We explore the ways in which research into writers’ lives and experiences gives us a unique insight into their writing.
Objectives
Objectives of the centre include:
- Becoming a hub for the exchange of ideas on literary biography and biographical criticism as tools for research, teaching and critical analysis.
- Operating as a means of exchange for individuals world-wide to discuss the pragmatics of scholarly biographical research and how we make use of findings, involving: unpublished archives; published and unpublished correspondence; diaries; notebooks; manuscript material; anecdotal, historical and contextual detail; and interviews.
- Overall, attention will be given to the various ways in which we use evidential and contextual material, along with speculation, as a basis for a portrait of the author and an evaluation of their work, and crucially on the manner in which we justify our methods.
- Most significantly, we will be a forum for the establishment of literary biography as a recognised field of teaching and research in literary studies.
- The Centre will encourage exchanges between non-academic literary biographers and trade publishers and their academic counterparts as a means of establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between universities and non-academic literary culture, with literary biography as the focus.
- We will examine the potential for the study of literary biography as a route towards careers in publishing and as a grounding for those who wish to write and publish biographies of authors.
Founded in 2019, the ULBRC will host meetings and conferences as a means of realising its objectives as the single academic research centre dedicated to the study of literary biography.
PhD Programme
We also plan to run a PhD programme focussed on the complexities and opportunities of literary biography.
Publishing Project
The ULBRC is currently host to a major research and publishing project edited by Professor Richard Bradford. The Life of the Author is a series - begun in 2020 and due to continue for nine years - of over seventy-five single-authored, peer-reviewed volumes published by Wiley/Blackwell.
The volumes will cover all major writers in English, Irish and American literature and the interaction between writers and of literary movements.
The books will appeal to undergraduates, academics and non-academic readers alike, translating authors’ lives into gripping narratives that will shed light on their novels, poems and plays.
In partnership with the ULBRC, Wiley/Blackwell will also publish several multi-authored volumes on the techniques and objectives of researching and writing literary biography with a view to bringing literary biography closer to the centre of academic literary studies.
At present literary biographies are the most popular form of books about writing outside of academia; and yet literary biography is rarely a taught subject in universities. It is one of the objectives of the ULBRC to narrow this divide.
This new series aims to transform literary biography from its status as a resource for facts and details to that of a dynamic, innovative aspect of teaching, criticism, and research. Outside universities lives of writers are by far the most popular genre of books about literature, but within them they are neglected as a focus for interpretation and as frameworks for advanced research. The Life of the Author will reverse this imbalance by exploring new questions on how and why our conception of the author frames our evaluation and understanding of their work.
First books in this series
- The Life of the Author: John Milton: Poet and Revolutionary. By Richard Bradford
- The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou. By Linda Wagner-Martin
- The Life of the Author: Shakespeare. By Anna Beer
All of the books in The Life of the Author series are available for purchase on the Wiley/Blackwell website.
Professor Richard Bradford
Professor Richard Bradford, founder and Director of the ULBRC, has held university posts in Oxford, (where he completed his doctorate), Wales and Trinity College, Dublin.
He has published more than thirty books, including nine acclaimed literary biographies on writers such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, John Milton, Martin Amis, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell.
He edited the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Literary Biography and is Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon.
Internal Fellows of the Ulster Literary Biography Research Centre (ULBRC)
- Dr Stephen Butler
- Dr Katherine Byrne
- Dr Kevin De Ornellas
- Dr Frank Ferguson
- Dr Tim Hancock
- Professor Jan Jedrzejewski
- Dr Andrew Keanie
- Dr Kathleen McCracken
- Dr Frank Sewell
- Dr Willa Murphy
- Dr James Ward
The Administrative Manager of the ULBRC is Connor James.
Professor Martin Stannard
Professor of English, Leicester University
View Overview for Professor Martin Stannard
Professor Martin Stannard
Martin Stannard is Professor of English at Leicester University. He has published the acclaimed two-volume (1986 and 1992) biography of Evelyn Waugh and in 2009 he published the equally well-received authorised biography of Muriel Spark. He contributed an essay on Waugh and Spark to the Companion to Literary Biography (ed. R. Bradford, 2018). Presently he is working on a life of Ford Madox Ford, and he is Co-Executive Editor of the OUP forty-three-volume, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, a project funded by a £822,000 AHRC grant. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association.
Professor Paul Baines
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Liverpool
View Overview for Professor Paul Baines
Professor Paul Baines
Paul Baines is Professor of Eighteenth-Century literature in the Department of English, University of Liverpool. Among his publications are: The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999); The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000); Five Romantic Plays, 1768-1821 (edited with Edward Burns, 2000); Edmund Curll, Bookseller (with Pat Rogers, 2007); The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing, 1660-1789 (with Pat Rogers and Julian Ferraro, 2011); and The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton, 1756-1814 (2014).
Professor John Batchelor
Emeritus Professor, Newcastle University
View Overview for Professor John Batchelor
Professor John Batchelor
John Batchelor is an Emeritus Professor of Newcastle University and a former Fellow of New College, Oxford. His earliest book was a brief life of the fantasist and illustrator Mervyn Peake, and his later books include biographies of Conrad, Ruskin, and Tennyson, and also of Ruskin’s closest woman friend, Pauline, Lady Trevelyan. He has also published monographs on Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells, a literary history, The Edwardian Novelists (1982), and an edited volume on The Art of Literary Biography (1995). He lives in Oxford, where he continues his academic affiliation with New College.
View Overview for Dr Anna Breer
Dr Anna Breer
Anna Beer is a biographer and literary critic. She was University Lecturer in Literature at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford, between 2003 and 2010, and remains a Fellow of Kellogg College and Senior Course Tutor in Creative Writing at Oxford. She is the author of the first Life of the wife of Sir Walter Raleigh, Bess - My Just Desire: The Life of Bess Raleigh, Wife to Sir Walter (2003) - and a biography of John Milton: Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (2008). More recently, she has written a feminist study of eight female composers written for non-specialists: Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (2016). Her biography of Shakespeare - The Life of the Author: Shakespeare (2021) - was published this year.
View Overview for Dr Emily Bell
Dr Emily Bell
Emily Bell specializes in Charles Dickens and life writing, having completed her PhD on “Changing Representations of Charles Dickens, 1857-1939” at the University of York in 2017. She has published on “A Lost Autobiographical Sketch” in Wilkie Collins Journal, 14 (2017) and on “The Dickens Family, the Boz Club and the Fellowship” in Dickensian, 502.113.3 (2017). She is editing Dickens After Dickens, a volume of collected essays on Dickens criticism and biography.
Professor Robert Crawford
Professor of Modern Scottish Literature, Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry, University of St Andrews
View Overview for Professor Robert Crawford
Professor Robert Crawford
Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews. He has published more than ten books, including works on post-Renaissance Scottish Literature, Contemporary Poetry and Modernism, and has also produced volumes of poetry and collaborations with visual artists. The first volume of his life of T. S. Eliot, Young Eliot: from St Louis to The Waste Land (2015) was widely acclaimed and he is currently completing the second volume.
Dr Jane Darcy
Teaching fellow, King’s College London
View Overview for Dr Jane Darcy
Dr Jane Darcy
Jane Darcy was awarded a PhD from King’s College London in 2009 for her thesis on the interaction of melancholy and literary biography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2010 she received British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and her monograph - Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816 - was published in 2013. She is now a teaching fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently writing a book on Jane Austen and melancholy.
Professor Claire Davison
Professor of Modernist Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
View Overview for Professor Claire Davison
Professor Claire Davison
Claire Davison is Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky (Edinburgh University press, 2014) and the co-editor (with Gerri Kimber) of a number of recent volumes on literary modernism, including the fourth volume of The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, in Four Volumes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012-2016) and The Collected Poetry of Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
Dr Catherine Delafield
Independent scholar
View Overview for Dr Catherine Delafield
Dr Catherine Delafield
Dr Catherine Delafield is an independent scholar based in Devon who has published articles on women’s life writing, diaries and the serialization of popular fiction. She is the author of Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth Century Novel (2009) and Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines (2015). Her latest monograph is Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840-1885 (2020) and her biography of Jane Austen will be published by Wiley/Blackwell.
Professor Kay Ferres
Professor Emerita of Literature and History, Griffith University
View Overview for Professor Kay Ferres
Professor Kay Ferres
Kay Ferres is Professor Emerita of Literature and History at Griffith University, Australia. She has published on Australian writers, modernism, and biography. She is currently working on a group biography of the Australian writers Nettie Palmer and Katherine Susannah Prichard and their friend Hilda Esson, The Life of Houses.
Professor Madalena Gonzalez
Professor of Anglophone Literature, University of Avignon
View Overview for Professor Madalena Gonzalez
Professor Madalena Gonzalez
Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon and head of the multidisciplinary research group ICTT. She has published widely on Anglophone literature and culture and is author of Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe (Rodopi, 2004).
Professor Andrew Harrison
Associate Professor in English, Nottingham University
View Overview for Professor Andrew Harrison
Professor Andrew Harrison
Andrew Harrison is Associate Professor in English at Nottingham University and is Head of its D. H. Lawrence Research Centre. He has published widely on Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and other authors of that period. His 2016 biography of Lawrence was widely acclaimed and he is working on another life of this author for the Wiley/Blackwell The Life of the Author series.
Professor Craig Howes
Professor of English, University of Hawaii
View Overview for Professor Craig Howes
Professor Craig Howes
Craig Howes is Director of the Center for Biographical Research, Co-Editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He co-edited Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA, 2007, with Miriam Fuchs), and is the author of Voices of the Vietnam POWs (Oxford University press, 1993).
Professor Andrew James
Professor in the School of Commerce, Meiji University
View Overview for Professor Andrew James
Professor Andrew James
Andrew James is a Professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo. His biography-monograph, Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience (McGill-Queen’s University Press), appeared in June 2016. Within the field of archival studies, he has particular interest in the role of draft revisions in the creative process and is currently working on a biography of Graham Greene.
Professor Thomas Lockwood
Professor Emeritus of English, University of Washington
View Overview for Professor Thomas Lockwood
Professor Thomas Lockwood
Thomas Lockwood is Professor Emeritus of English and former department chair at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the editor of the drama volumes of the oxford “Wesleyan” edition of the works of Henry Fielding and is completing a biography of Jonathan Swift for the Blackwell Critical Biographies series.
Dr Jane McVeigh
Honorary Research fellow - University of Roehampton, Associate Lecturer - Oxford University
View Overview for Dr Jane McVeigh
Dr Jane McVeigh
Jane McVeigh is Honorary Research fellow in the Department of English & Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, and Associate Lecturer for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Her publications include: In Collaboration with British Literary Biography: Haunting Conversations (Palgrave, 2017).
Professor Morra Linda M
Professor of Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies, Bishop’s University
View Overview for Professor Morra Linda M
Professor Morra Linda M
Linda M. Morra is Professor of Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies at Bishop’s University. She served as the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (2016-2017) and as a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley (2016). Her book, Unarrested Archives (2014), was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English, and her edition of Jane Rule’s Taking My Life (2011) was a finalist for the LAMBDA prize (2012).
Professor Julian North
Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Leicester
View Overview for Professor Julian North
Professor Julian North
Julian North is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, University of Leicester. She specializes in Romantic and Victorian life writing. She is the author of The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and on the editors of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Pickering & Chatto, 2000-2003, 21 vols.). She is currently working on literary portraiture in Victorian Britain.
Dr Peter Orford
Lecturer, University of Buckingham
View Overview for Dr Peter Orford
Dr Peter Orford
Peter Orford is a lecturer at the University of Buckingham and Course Director for Research in Charles Dickens Studies. He is the author of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel and Our Endless Attempts to End It (2018), has published widely on 19th century fiction, and is currently working on a biography of Charles Dickens for the Wiley/Blackwell The Life of the Author series.
Professor Lois Potter
Professor Emerita, University of Delaware
View Overview for Professor Lois Potter
Professor Lois Potter
Lois Potter, Ned B, Allen Professor Emerita of the University of Delaware, has taught at the Universities of Aberdeen, Leicester, Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Tsuda College, Tokyo. She has published on Milton, English Civil War literature, the theatrical history of Twelfth Night and Othello, and Robin Hood. She edited The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Arden Shakespeare and Pericles for the Norton Complete Works. Her most recent book is The Life of William Shakespeare (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Dr Amber K Regis
Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Sheffield
View Overview for Dr Amber K Regis
Dr Amber K Regis
Amber K. Regis is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, and her research explores life writing across different media and genres. Recent publications include a critical edition of the The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester University Press, 2017, co-edited with Deborah Wynne). The latter volume contains her essays on Brontë portraiture and 1930s biographical stage plays.
Professor Carl Rollyson
Professor Emeritus of Journalism, Baruch College
View Overview for Professor Carl Rollyson
Professor Carl Rollyson
Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, has published biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Dana Andrews, and Walter Brennan, and several studies of biography, including Confessions of a Serial Biographer (McFarland, 2016). He recently published: The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, both in 2020.
Professor Dale Salwak
Professor of English Literature, Citrus College, California
View Overview for Professor Dale Salwak
Professor Dale Salwak
Dale Salwak is Professor of English Literature at Southern California’s Citrus College. His publications include: The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions (Macmillan Press, 1996), Living with a Writer (Palgrave, 2004), Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (Iowa, 2008), Writers and Their Mothers (Palgrave, 2018), and biographical studies of: Kingsley Amis, John Braine, A.J. Cronin, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, Carl Sandburg, Anne Tyler, and John Wain. He is a recipient of Purdue University’s Distinguished Alumni Award and is also a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement.
D J Taylor
Novelist, biographer, journalist and literary critic
View Overview for D J Taylor
D J Taylor
D. J. Taylor is a novelist, biographer, journalist and literary critic. He read Modern History at St John’s College, Oxford and his biography of Orwell (2003) won the Whitbread Award. He has also published an acclaimed biography of Thackeray (1999) along with collective biographies such as Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918 – 1940 (2007) and Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature, 1939 – 1951 (2019). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his novel Derby Day (2011) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Professor Marion Turner
Associate Professor of English, Jesus College, Oxford
View Overview for Professor Marion Turner
Professor Marion Turner
Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of Chaucerian Conflict (OUP, 2007) and the editor of A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Her biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer: A European Life, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019.
Professor Linda Wagner-Martin
Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina
View Overview for Professor Linda Wagner-Martin
Professor Linda Wagner-Martin
Linda Wagner-Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published more than fifty books, including biographies of: Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou. She has been awarded the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature, has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Professor Claire Brant
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Department of English, King’s College London
View Overview for Professor Claire Brant
Professor Claire Brant
Clare Brant is Professor of Eighteenth-century Literature and Culture in the Department of English, King’s College London, where she also co-Directs the Centre for Life-Writing Research, and is Project Director of Strandlines: Lives on the Strand ~ past, present and creative. Among her publications are: Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006), winner of the ESSE Book Award 2008, and Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination on Britain 1783-1786 (2017). She has co-edited numerous special issues on life writing subjects, including death (European Journal of Life Writing vol. 9, 2020, with James Metcalf and Jane Wildgoose) and digital media (EJLW vol.8, 2019, with Rob Gallagher) and published articles on a wide range of subjects including cuttlefish, aeronautics, smell, diaries, obituaries and sea squirts. Four collections of her poetry have been published by Shoestring Press, most recently Breathing Space (2020). She is currently writing a book on underwater lives.
Professor Nicholas Roe
Professor of English, University of St Andrews
View Overview for Professor Nicholas Roe
Professor Nicholas Roe
Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He did his doctorate at Trinity College, Oxford and he is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He specialises in Romanticism and literary biography and his many acclaimed books include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988), Keats and History (1995), Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001), Fiery Heart. The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005), and John Keats. A New Life (2012).
Professor Max Saunders
Professor of English, Liverpool University
View Overview for Professor Max Saunders
Professor Max Saunders
Max Saunders has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard universities. He took his PhD at Cambridge and after a time as fellow and tutor at Selwyn College, Cambridge he moved to King’s College, London, becoming a Professor in 2000. Presently he is Professor of English at Liverpool University and co-director of the ‘Centre For Life-Writing Research’ at King’s College, London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Duel Life (2012) and Self Impression. Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010) along with numerous other works on life-writing/literary biography. He co-edits the ‘Palgrave Studies in Life-Writing’ series of books.
Jayne Parsons
Editor and Publishing Director, Bloomsbury Publishing
View Overview for Jayne Parsons
Jayne Parsons
Jayne Parsons is an editor and Publishing Director for Bloomsbury Publishing, looking after several imprints including Bloomsbury Caravel and Tauris Parke which specialise in biography and autobiography, history and travel books. She has been working on both narrative and illustrated non-fiction books for more than thirty years.
Recent publications include:
Rebel Writers: The Accidental Feminists by Celia Brayfield
The Dragon Lady by Louisa Tregar
Road to Nowhere by Anita Leslie
Conan Doyle’s Wide World by Andrew Lycett
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford
Jayne read History at the University of Lancaster and still can’t believe she actually gets paid to read books.
Dr Andrew Lownie
Senior Research Fellow in Modern British History, University of Buckingham
View Overview for Dr Andrew Lownie
Dr Andrew Lownie
Andrew Lownie read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge before taking his Masters and doctorate at Edinburgh University. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Buckingham, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, President of the Biographers Club and on the Advisory Board of Biographers International Organisation and has been a publisher, journalist and since 1988 run his own literary agency. His books include several books on literary Edinburgh, lives of the writer John Buchan, spy Guy Burgess, naval officer Louis Mountbatten and a forthcoming biography of the Duke of Windsor. He regularly lectures on biography, getting published and the subjects of his books.
View Overview for Dr Roger Lewis
Dr Roger Lewis
Roger Lewis was born in Wales in 1960 and educated in Scotland ( St Andrews University -- First Class Honours, 1982 ) and Magdalen College, Oxford ( Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize, Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize, Chancellor's English Essay Prize ), and received an Honorary MA in 1984, when he became a Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College and a Lecturer at St Catherine's. He holds a PhD and an Honorary DLitt from the University of Hertfordshire and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Asiatic Society and English-Speaking Union. He has written biographies of Peter Sellers ( filmed by HBO ), Laurence Olivier ( made into a documentary by Channel Four ), Charles Hawtrey and Anthony Burgess, amongst other publications. His Seasonal Suicide Notes (2009) topped the bestseller list for several weeks. Future projects include a book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and a study of comedy and comedians. Lewis is Chief Book Reviewer for the Daily Mail and writes most weeks in the Telegraph, Times and Spectator. He is the television columnist of The Oldie Magazine. Lewis' wife is the Principal, Children's Psychology and Educational Service, East Sussex, and the family divide their time between Hastings, Normandy, Austria and Southern Italy.
