New appointment: Professor Bran Nicol
Thursday 10 May 2012
We have recently agreed the appointment of Professor Bran Nicol to the School of English and Languages. Bran is currently Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Prior to that he worked as a lecturer in English at the University of Chichester. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Lancaster University, and an MA in English Literature and Contemporary European Studies from the University of Dundee.
His research focuses on three main areas: British and American fiction of the post-Second World War period, crime fiction and crime film, and cultural studies. His work on modern and contemporary fiction includes monographs on Iris Murdoch and D. M. Thomas, and the Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009). He is co-editor of the collection, Crime Culture (2010). In 2006 he published the acclaimed Stalking (Reaktion Books), a study of 'stalking culture' which has been translated into several languages. He has recently completed a book on the private eye in cinema, which examines the figure of the private detective from the 1940s to the present-day. It will be published by Reaktion Books in Spring 2013.
Bran’s current research continues his interest in how cultural production expresses prevalent desires and anxieties, and in 'crime culture' more generally. He is working on two projects: one which explores the deployment of crime fiction motifs in the work of fêted literary authors such as Borges, Nabokov and Spark; another which examines the figure of the neighbour in modern fiction and film.
Bran has been a member of the AHRC peer review college since 2007, sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique and The Iris Murdoch Review, and has been an invited speaker at numerous universities in the UK and in Europe.
We look forward to welcoming Bran to the University from September 2012.
