What are your research interests?
Twentieth-century American fiction, masculinities, war representation, creative non-fiction/memoir
What was your last publication about?
Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and its use of ambiguity. It’s a piece of participatory journalism that foregrounds Mailer’s subjective response to the Vietnam protests in 1968.
What are you currently working on?
An edited collection provisionally titled Music, Memoir, Memory with YSJ colleague Rob Edgar. It’s a look at the narratives involved in writing about music and the current trend for nostalgia and memorialisation. Plus, I’m starting the process of turning my PhD thesis into a monograph.
Which modules are you teaching on this year?
At UG level I’m teaching on Reading Texts I, Forms of Narrative, American Literature Space & Place, Contemporary Writing, Gender & Writing, and American Literature in the Twentieth Century. On the MA I teach on Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, and Contemporary American Literature.
Is there a topic or text you especially enjoy teaching?
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It is genuinely the most moving novel I have ever read. Simultaneously, it’s a slippery devil full of postmodern trickery!
What do you read for pleasure, when you’re not researching?
Anything to do with music, especially the American underground or electronic music. I also wait for any new John Irving novels with insane levels of excitement.
Follow Fraser on Twitter: @FraserYSJ