Allan Johnson

Dr Allan Johnson


Professor of English Literature
BA (Baldwin-Wallace), MA (Leeds), PhD (Leeds)
+441483 683122
11 AD 02

About

Areas of specialism

Literary modernism; Modernism and mass culture; Esotericism; Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic literary theory; Contemplative studies; Narrative theory

My qualifications

PhD, English Literature
University of Leeds
MA, Twentieth-Century Literature
University of Leeds
BA, English with Art History
Baldwin-Wallace College

Previous roles

2013 - 2016
Assistant Professor of English Literature
City University of Hong Kong
2012 - 2012
Associate Lecturer
Birkbeck, University of London

Affiliations and memberships

Fellow
Royal Society of Arts
Associate Fellow
Higher Education Academy

News

In the media

2021
Witchcraft and Margaret Murray
Guest
BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking
2017
Florence Farr
Guest
BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking

Research

Research interests

Supervision

Completed postgraduate research projects I have supervised

Teaching

Publications

Highlights

  • The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022; softcover 2024).
  • Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature: Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning, 1919-1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; softcover 2019).
  • Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; softcover 2016).
  • ‘Contingency and the Categorical Imperative in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
  • ‘Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending”’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, (2024) 37:1.
  • ‘“A little bit naughty”: The Logotherapeutic Process in Tim Minchin’s Matilda the Musical’, Studies in Musical Theatre, (2023) 17:2, 95-105.
  • ‘Intermodernism and the Ethics of Being Late in Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton’, English Studies, (2023) 104:1, 120-133.
  • ‘The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy’, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion, eds. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
  • ‘Bernard Shaw’s Gnostic Genius’, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, (2021) 20:2, 35-49.
  • ‘The Multiple Mobilities of Civil Rights in Jeanine Tesori’s Violet and Caroline, or Change’, Studies in Musical Theatre, (2020), 14:3, 243-543.
  • ‘Decadence in the Time of AIDS’, Decadence: A Literary History, ed. Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
  • With Didi Udofia, ‘Using Mindfulness Meditation Techniques to Support Peer-to-Peer Dialogue in Seminars’, Enhancing Student-Centred Teaching Through Student-Staff Partnerships, eds Karen Gravett, Nadya Yakovchuk, and Ian Kinchin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
  • ‘“[God] is a flaming Hebrew letter’: Esoteric Camp in Angels in America’, Literature and Theology (2019), 33:2, 206-222.
  • ‘“A gay story, a history”: Gay Male Liberation and Queer Rumination’, Accelerated Times, Volume 5: British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000, eds Berthold Schoene and Eileen Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • With Aren Roukema, ‘Time to Drop the “Western”’, Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism (2018), 6:2, 109-115.
  • ‘The Pleasure of Conspicuous Leisure in Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth’, English Studies, (2017) 98:8, 968-977.
  • ‘T.S. Eliot and the Modernist Thunderbolt’, The Startling New, ed. Mary Pat Brady (Detroit: Gale, 2017).
  • ‘Architectural Space and the Failures of ‘Complete’ Houses in Heartbreak House’, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, (2016) 36:2, 203-14.
  • ‘“The doors would be taken off their hinges”: Space, Place, and Architectural Absence in Virginia Woolf’, English Studies, (2016) 97:4, 412-419.  
  • ‘Designing “Authenticity” in Digital Learning Environments’, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, (2016) 9.
  • ‘Thresholds of Interpretation: Identifying, Producing, and Supporting with The Turn of  the Screw’ CEA Critic (Journal of the College English Association) (2015) 77.2, 196-210.
  • ‘The Authentic and Artificial Histories of Mechanical Reproduction in Doctorow’s Ragtime’, Orbis Litterarum, (2015) 72:2, 89-107.
  • ‘It’s Vestimentary, My Dear Watson: Fashion, Disguise, and Criminality in Sherlock’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, (2014) 4:2, 115-127.
  • ‘Buried Temples and Open Planes: Alethea Hayter, Alan Hollinghurst, and the Architecture of Drug-Taking’, Textual Practice, (2013), 27:7, 1177-1195.
  • Review of Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, in Notes and Queries, (2011), 58:3.
  • ‘Artistic Excision and Scientific Production in Cather’s The Professor’s House’, The Explicator, (2010), 68:2.   
  • Review of Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, in Notes and Queries, (2010), 57:2.
  • ‘Voices and Language in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’, T.S. Eliot, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2009).
  • ‘Ambrose Silk, The Yellow Book, and The Ivory Tower: Influence and Jamesian Aesthetics in Put Out More Flags’, Evelyn Waugh Studies, (2009), 40:2.
  • ‘Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Dracula, ed. Jack Lynch (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2009).
  • Review of Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870- 1914,  in Notes and Queries, (2009), 56:1.
  • ‘“You are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker”: Renovation of Space and the Mediating Presence of Baedeker’s Northern Italy in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View’, Origins of English Literary Modernism, 1870-1914. ed. by Gregory Tague (Palo Alto, CA.: Academica, 2008).
  • Review of Ferdinand Saumarez Smith, Eleusis and Enlightenment: The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Journal of Religious History.