“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” – Stéphane Mallarmé
Dr Anne-Marie Evans – Head of English Literature
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the lit department?
I enjoy lots of things about working at YSJ. One of the things I like is that we’re quite a small campus; we’re quite a small community. I like that we all know each other on campus and there is that sense of community. What I really like about the Lit department is that the sense of community really continues and we get to know one another. There’s a friendly atmosphere. I think that the tutors have a reputation for being approachable which I think is important. I love all the extra activities that we put on for students. At the moment we’ve got the Literature Festival going on – we’ve actually had loads of things happening, such as trips and visiting speakers. I like the fact that this is a really lively and vibrant department to be a part of: staff members get really involved in events and projects for our students, and our students want to be involved as well. So, for me, that’s part of the fun of working here.
What makes somebody a good English literature student?
That’s a good question! I think you have to be passionate about what you’re reading. I think you have to have a sense of why literature is important and why books can, and have, changed the world. So I think being passionate, being enthusiastic, but also being able to take feedback as well are crucial, and it’s vital too to be able to respond to feedback and to listen to feedback. Some of the best students that I’ve seen that have gone through the programme are the ones who have just really worked so hard on listening to tutors, taking a really careful note of their feedback, and their marks have just gone up and up and up. I also think really good Literature students want to get involved and think about the world beyond literature. So it’s great to see so many students who come along and support us when we do events for things like Black History Month, LGBT History month, and International Women’s Day. So helping students to think about the connections between literature and the real world, and seeing them getting involved outside of class is absolutely fantastic. I think that kind of engagement can only make you a better student.
What’s your specialist subject?
My specialist area is American Literature, and specifically I look at material culture and the novel. I’m really interested in women’s writing from the early 20th century. I particularly like American women writers Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow and Gertrude Stein. What I’m really interested in is how ideas about material culture and commodities are explored through fiction. For example, department stores don’t really come into being until the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century, and suddenly women in books start to go shopping. I’m interested in when a woman shops in a book, during this period early period, she’s a shopaholic. But if a man goes shopping, he’s a collector, he’s a connoisseur of certain items. I’m interested in how gender interacts with economics, commercialism, advertising, consumer culture and the way in which various American women writers have tried to analyse that through their writing. That’s my main area.
Is that something you’ve always been interested in? Or was it through studying that you gained an interest in it?
It was through study really. I got interested in American Literature in the very final year of my undergraduate degree and it was simply because I swapped modules. I was supposed to be doing a module on Renaissance literature and the writer I really wanted to study had been taken off the module. I just thought ‘I’m going to do another module’ and the only one that was open to me was American Literature. I’d never done any American Literature before, and I’d never been to America. I hadn’t really read very much American Lit, never really studied it, and I did this module and it quite literally changed my life. After my undergraduate degree I did an MA in American Literature, and it was when I was doing my MA that I got interested in the ideas I’ve described. When I did my PHD, I explored some of these ideas in much more detail. I’m still interested in that area but I look at other things as well. I’ve just written a chapter for a book that’s coming out quite soon, and it’s about post-apocalyptic narratives. It’s specifically about food and how it functions within the texts that I’m looking at. I was inspired to write the chapter because of some of the books that I’ve been teaching on our MA programme. I just got really interested in them and thought ‘I’m going to write about this’. Sometimes research interests come from your teaching, because you just enjoy teaching a particular text so much that a research interest can develop.
What’s your favourite book?
I can’t answer that! I get asked this a lot and it’s one of the hardest questions. I can’t even deal with the question; I have so many favourite books. One of my favourite books is a novel by Edith Wharton called The House of Mirth which is just a really beautiful novel about the difficulties of being a woman in a patriarchal, unforgiving society. That book makes me cry. I’m very fond of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which is another incredible novel which also makes me cry. There are so many books that have changed and influenced me at certain points in my life. I’m also very fond of The Tiger Who Came to Tea which I remember with great fondness from my childhood. I can’t name just one book, I probably couldn’t even cut it down to 50. I just think there are so many books that are incredible. Every time I teach certain books, I get reminded of how fantastic they are.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
Read as much as you can. That is my advice. Don’t just read something because you think it’s going to be on the syllabus, read for pleasure, read to educate yourself. Just read, read, read whether you’re reading newspapers, short stories, novels, poems or plays- read as much as you can. Go to the theatre, go and experience art in the broadest sense of the word. I always think the best advice is read as much as you can, because reading is never wasted. Many students think if they’re not going to write an essay on something they don’t need to read it because they’ll get nothing from it. However, reading is a great pleasure and a privilege in its own right, so I would just say go and read as much as you possibly can… and then read a bit more.
Could you tell us a little bit about being Subject Director?
I took over as Subject Director in September and it’s been really exciting. It’s been a really busy year. The team have been incredible – all the staff are so hard working and they’re such a pleasure to work with. I’ve really enjoyed it, and we’ve had some really exciting developments. We’ve had visiting speakers coming in, new events that we’re putting on, and projects that we’re planning for next year. I’ve really enjoyed being Subject Director, although I’ve missed teaching – I don’t get to teach as much. I’m only teaching one or two classes at the moment and I’m used to teaching much more than that. But I enjoy looking at the English Literature programme as a whole and thinking, what could we do for the students here? What could we do to improve things here? What would make this more exciting? I enjoy thinking about York St John students coming in at the beginning of first year, having a journey and emerging at the other end. I like thinking quite strategically about how we make this even better. I think it’s already a really good degree programme, but it’s great to consider how we can make it even better.
Dr Abi Curtis – Head of Creative Writing
What is it that you enjoy about working at York St John?
It’s really nice that it’s quite a small university, so you get to know students really well. It’s a friendly environment. I think it’s a very creative institution, so I enjoy that about it. My students like to get involved in events – like the Literature Festival and the Creative Writing anthology – and become part of a writing community. Then my colleagues are all very talented. On the Creative Writing team, we’ve got script-writing, fiction writing, poetry writing, and non-fiction writing. That’s quite inspiring, to work with colleagues that have all of those specialisms. And I think York is a really beautiful, amazing, cultural city. It’s got lots of things going for it.
What makes somebody a good English Literature or Creative Writing student?
Definitely, for both, somebody who reads a lot, is willing to read a lot, and enjoys reading. For a Creative Writing student, somebody who thinks about the texts they read in terms of how they might learn from them as writers. For a Literature student, it’s interrogating those texts and interpreting them, and thinking about how those texts work in the world. So, reading a lot and writing a lot makes you a good student, but also being a good team worker makes you a good student. So, supporting your fellow students and being involved with things is crucial; this means being in class and also means, if you’re a creative writer, helping people to edit their work. It’s about seeing yourself as part of the community. And again, it’s about doing lots of reading!
What’s the best thing about the Creative Writing department here?
I think the team are really good because they’re all published, practising writers, but it’s maybe slightly different from some other Creative Writing departments in that they’ve got quite strong academic backgrounds as well, bringing in the critical side. I think we’re very lucky because we’ve got a single honours Creative Writing degree and a lot of other universities only have a strand within their Literature department, so if people want to do quite a lot of Creative Writing modules they can do. We can support lots of different forms of writing, so the things you might expect – scriptwriting, fiction, poetry, non-fiction – but also things like experimental writing. Students might want to write graphic novels or get involved with writing scripts for computer games, so we try to sort of stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in contemporary literature. And I guess some of the other things that I mentioned before about being in York and having strong links to the Literature Festival make us a strong department. We’re lucky in that we’re able to bring in some really good visiting writers. We’re very supportive of our students as well; York St John generally is very supportive of its students – we can offer a lot of one-to-one support. And we can offer a Masters and PHD so if people want to stay we can offer a full range of courses.
What is your specialist subject?
I’ve got a few different specialisms. I write poetry and I’ve just started getting into writing short stories and novels. I’m interested in speculative fiction and science fiction. I’m interested in contemporary poetry. I’m interested in psychoanalysis, which is what I did my PHD in. I’m also interested in cross-disciplinary work, so working with artists and musicians and scientists and doing writing that might be inspired by other kinds of disciplines. So, quite a lot of different things. At the moment I’m working on a sort of science fiction/speculative fiction novel. That’s my current project.
When did you become interested in creative writing and academia in general?
I suppose for creative writing it’s slightly different to some other academic subjects because I probably enjoyed creative writing from a really young age, like a lot of kids do. I always enjoyed English Literature at school and then I did a degree in English Literature and Cultural Studies, which also included film and psychoanalysis. My Masters degree was specifically in Creative Writing, then I did a PHD in Creative and Critical Writing. Whilst I was doing that, I was writing a lot of poetry and having some success getting poems published, so I ended up publishing a couple of poetry collections. That led me towards poetry, but I’d always really enjoyed writing fiction as well. I think if you like reading, the natural step for some people is to try and write as well. So, I got interested from quite a young age, and then from university onward I developed the more academic side.
Did you know that you wanted to teach?
Yes, I did really enjoy teaching. After I did my first degree, I went off for a couple of years and did various odd jobs, and one of the things I did was a TEFL teaching course where I was teaching English as a foreign language. And I did summer school teaching and things. I had a bit of experience of the social side of being with students which I really enjoyed, but I was conscious at the time that it wasn’t really the subject I wanted to be teaching. I wanted to be teaching at higher level; I really enjoy teaching advanced students because I can teach them more creative writing. So, when I came back to do a Masters and PHD, I had half a mind that I’d quite like to carry on after the PHD and get an academic job.
What is your favourite book and why?
It changes, but I love The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. She won the Booker Prize for that 20 years ago, and I notice that she’s got another novel coming out after 20 years. If I were allowed to pick a couple of other things, I do like Alice Munro, who’s a short story writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature a couple of years ago. I think short stories are a really underepresented form. And, with my fiction students this year, we looked at Stephen King’s first novel Carrie, which is a brilliant horror novel. In terms of poetry, Ted Hughes is a big influence, and someone like Alice Oswald as a contemporary poet. I know that’s cheating, I had about five, but it’s a really hard question! And it changes all the time.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
Read a lot. Read the newspapers and read the literature sections of things like The Times and The Guardian to see what’s happening in literature now and what’s happening in the world. If people have access to a creative writing group in college or in school where they can share their writing that’s really good, as it’s useful to start sharing your creative work with other people. Or if prospective Literature students, maybe start a book group where you read a book every couple of weeks and talk about it, that kind of warms you up for the seminar situation. Do interesting stuff. Don’t sit at home in your room all the time reading. Go out and experience the world. Also, if you have access to things like literary festivals or local writers coming and doing readings in bookshops or libraries, go and take advantage of that if it’s not too expensive. Go and see local writers talking about their work. There’s a few things you can do to kind of warm up to university life. And learn how to cook!
Dr Liesl King- Deputy Head of School: Humanities, Religion and Theology.
Literature At Work Module Director
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the Literature department?
The best thing about the Deputy Head role, and this was also true about the Head of English role I had previously, is that there is so much variety. Things come up that are different all the time, so you might be talking to a colleague about an idea for a paper that you’re writing, you might be developing new lecture material, and you might be reading new texts when you’re developing new modules, or even for modules that are already in existence but you want to tweak. You’re supporting students, helping them with their writing and giving them a chance to build on their existing skills. You go to meetings all the time, and these are usually interesting as they are about how to improve the way in which the university functions, and making sure that students are getting the best deal that they can from each programme. I’m never, ever bored. Sometimes I get tired, because there isn’t a definite end to the day, but this doesn’t matter in the bigger picture as it’s a very stimulating job.
What makes someone a good English Literature student?
A good Literature student comes with a real sense of curiosity, and he/ she is genuinely interested in what words can reveal about our lives and the contemporary experience. Also, a good student enjoys immersing themselves in the world of books. I think that’s a prerequisite. Then, through the degree, it’s about developing all of those soft skills that you then show off to your employers later. You don’t necessarily have to have natural ability or a flair for writing when you come in, but you do have to have a can-do attitude and a willingness to listen to feedback – you need to be able to come to tutorials to get some support, and to just really be willing to work on getting better. I think that’s one of the things that the Literature programme at YSJ has really focussed on – encouraging students to understand that of course, some people do have a flair for writing, but it’s genuinely the ability to focus, manage time and work hard that leads to improvement. It is absolutely key to explore secondary material that may shed light on the original text, and key to take the time to look at both kinds of texts – primary and secondary – side by side. Students who might be getting a low 2:2 in first year can genuinely move up through the three years so that they are attaining high 2:1 or first class work by the end if they focus on following up on feedback and on engaging with critical material. It’s great for us to see this when it happens; we try to put as much work in as we can, and then we feel absolutely brilliant when students respond and the hard work pays off!
What is your specialist subject?
My specialist subject is Science Fiction, and early on that was women’s science fiction and utopian science fiction, but that has really widened out to include a range of different sf texts and topics. I’m interested in almost everything science fictional, whether it’s Stranger Things on Netflix or whatever new contemporary novel has just come out. I especially enjoy what you might call literary science fiction; I’m less interested in what we might call ‘nerdy’ science fiction like Star Trek and Superman, but on the other hand, I’m open-minded!
When/how did you become interested in this particular subject?
My whole family loved English, but it was my step-dad who had lots of science fiction novels and anthologies of short stories on his shelf, so I read those as a teen. And then I had an extremely influential teacher during my time at San Francisco State – Professor Ellen Peel; she had published widely on Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin, and so I read The Left Hand of Darkness, which I love to this day. I had already read A Wizard of Earthsea on my own and loved it, and so having the opportunity to look at more work by Le Guin as a graduate student felt like going to SF State was ‘meant to be’.
What is your favourite book?
Depending on when you ask me (I have different answers to this question!), I might say A Wizard of Earthsea, the first of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, which was later expanded to include two additional novels. The first one is about a wizard who unleashes a dark spirit from the underworld, and it starts to plague and terrorise him, chasing him until he is forced to come to a particular moment of understanding. It can be read as a kind of mythic, allegorical journey to self-awareness, but I won’t say any more because I hope you might read it!
Do you have advice for prospective students?
Be careful not to treat first year as something that doesn’t count. Of course the university experience is more than just your classes, it’s about getting to grips with a new space, meeting lots of new friends and having fun. But you need to take your classes seriously because if you do want to get a good degree award, you want to be able to hit the ground running in second year, when your marks will start to count towards your final degree. If you’ve attended regularly in first year you will understand how to integrate critical sources, formulate an argument, and reference your work properly, which you will need to know how to do if you want to do well. If you really start to take control of your learning in first year you’ll be in a really good position to earn good mark in the first semester of second year.
Have you always known you wanted to teach?
Originally when I went to university, I did a Theatre degree for a couple of years because I had loved being involved in community and High School plays. But then I switched my major half way through, partly because there was this travelling theatre coupe that came and spoke to the theatre students; they said they were exhausted and never saw their families or their friends because they travelled all the time, and I didn’t think that it would be for me; I like my home and my books and a fairly quiet life. So I did what I said I wouldn’t do because there are so many teachers in my family, and I changed to English Literature. I didn’t have it firmly lodged in my head that teaching is what I would do, but I did start teaching English as a Foreign Language to put myself through my Masters degree. So, kind of yes and kind of no – teaching was an option in the back of my head.
What do you think is the main benefit of the Literature at Work module?
One of the things students said about an earlier incarnation of the module was that they felt it didn’t always tie in with their Literature degree. So when it came time to revalidate the module I thought we could do something different, and I had the idea to create the three different strands (guest speaker visits, literary analysis, and an external placement or internal project). I guess the main benefits could be said to be a couple of things: one, the module is meant to explore the way literature is not just some separate thing that people take in while in their armchairs at home, but that it’s directly connected with society and the way the world works. I wanted students to start to see the connections between what they were studying and the way books have an impact on culture and the way we think. Secondly, the aim of Lit at Work is to really help English Literature students feel confident about the skills that they are developing on the degree, to realise that they have something distinctive to offer, such as the critical skills they develop as they read and respond in seminars, and the writerly skills they develop through practice and through responding to feedback. I thought that if students could feel more confident then they would be able to start thinking about what they personally want to do in terms of a career, rather than just letting life suck them up. I wanted the module to offer students a sense of agency.
Dr Fraser Mann
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the Literature department?
I get to talk about books all day with people who like books so it’s a dream job really. My wife says I go to a book club for a living. It’s amazing, every day you hear new ideas and see people developing their confidence and expressing those new ideas, and you get to talk about how literature has a role in the world and how art helps us to understand the world around us. It is always interesting and exciting and every single day there is always something brand new to hear and you meet lots of people from all around the country, it couldn’t be better really.
What about YSJ in particular?
I went to YSJ when it used to be in two campuses, then I lived away from the north for a long time but when I did my PHD I came back and out of that I started doing a bit of part time teaching which I started in London, which developed into a career. Even though it’s been a long gap since my time of doing an undergraduate and now when you’re doing yours, it holds a lot of the same values including community and building confidence throughout the 3 years. It’s about helping you develop confidence and articulate your ideas and in my experience it’s fairly unique to YSJ that idea about community building and confidence building, the importance of helping people in their future, whether it’s more education or in a career. People undervalue the arts and humanities and you can develop a critical, curious, sceptical and articulate way of being in the world and being around other people and I think we’re really good at that and it gives myself and colleagues a sense a pride.
What makes a good English Literature student?
Being organised is really important, being able to plan your time and being proactive with your spare time, obviously it’s a degree which a lot relies on students using their time outside of the seminar room effectively. Most of the work is driven by yourself through reading, research, preparation, being organised, being disciplined and curiosity. It’s about wanting to know things and understand how people engage with the world.
What is your specialist subject?
I am an Americanist, my research is involved with American writing, and I’m really interested in autobiographical writing, particularly when it comes out of war, trauma and conflict. I’m also really interested in the way people write about music, my current project with Rob Edgar and Helen Pleasant on the way people write about their memories with music, how music, memoir and memory come together. I’m also interested in how gender is constructed within literature aswell. Which can all sometimes be happening in the same book, some not. But I always think storytelling and writing are what makes us human beings, everytime we speak to each other we are telling a story.
Was it something that you was always interested in?
I was an a-level teacher for a long time and we studied a Margaret Atwood novel called ‘Alias Grace’, I was interested in Literature but not as a specialist. The novel is about an Irish woman who goes to Canada during the Potato Famine, and is arrested for murder. She is a real-life historical person and Atwood was fascinated about some of the writing about her, diary entries and newspaper reports. She made this kind of patch-work into something new and I found that really interesting as these non-fiction snippets can be used as story-telling devices on their own and she combined and blended them into something new as a story but as a way of showing how to write a story about telling stories. The autobiographical mode is fascinating; how do we write about ourselves, how do we turn our life experiences into something literary, how does that autobiographical voice differ from creating someone new, are we creating a fiction of our own life, all of these interesting questions that come out of it. And given that I am interested in trauma, conflict and war narratives, those are individuals that have been through extraordinary experiences and circumstances. So the autobiographical mode becomes a way to explore those experiences and to try and make sense of them. When I started my PHD, I wanted to look at how America writes war but that soon developed into how America writes war through masculinity and how it writes war through really self-conscious engagement with story-telling, how much do they know that they are stories that are being told and how much truth and fiction is in there. I get excited when new autobiographical texts appear, so I suppose I’m an autobiographical geek, if there is such a thing. They range from these terrible books that footballers write, all the way to books such as Andy Owen’s ‘East of Coker’, which isn’t his auto-biography but there is an auto-biographical voice happening in there, someone trying to shape their own lives by the act of writing. It’s endlessly fascinating.
What is your favourite book?
‘Slaughterhouse 5’ by Kurt Vonnegut and the reason is when I was in my second year of my degree, it was on a module about post-second world war American literature and I had never read anything like it, it was completely new and different. The first time I read it I thought what is this rubbish, why is there aliens in a book about war? So I read it again and I suddenly fell head over heels in love with his writing, and he has this child-like simplicity that he uses to explain incredibly complex ideas. His writing is full of empathy and it appeals to our better nature as well, it asks us to be kind, thoughtful and passionate, to look at complicated and difficult things to try and make sense of those things. I think that the opening chapter in Slaughterhouse-five, which is in the auto-biographical voice, is extraordinarily powerful because it asks us to do that, to try and make sense of things that are almost too difficult to look at. I was genuinely heartbroken about his death as there is no more Vonnegut books, I have three books left that I am trying to ration out.
Did you not realise you wanted to be a teacher until later on?
I went through most of my degree not knowing what I wanted to do, I thought about journalism and maybe teaching but I didn’t really know until I had a job that I hated. I did a PGCE after four years that allowed me to teach in sixth-forms, colleges and universities and as soon as I started teaching I knew I loved it. The first two years were terrifying but it was endlessly exciting and it takes a while to get used to it. It doesn’t always go right and you make mistakes but I don’t get how people would want to do anything else.
Does it help give you ideas for your own research?
All the time, it’s a two way process, in seminar groups there’s always ideas that I haven’t thought of, like the uncanny in ‘The Falling Man’. This is why seminar rooms are so fertile, ideas bounce around and I haven’t thought of them before, someone will say something that sets off a chain of thinking. The great thing about humanities is that there is no right or wrong answers, the only thing that is a must is that people are thoughtful and base their ideas on reading and discussion and never jump to conclusions. I could teach that same seminar a hundred times and get a hundred different ideas and thoughts. The goal at the end of third year is for students to be confident in their own ideas and being critical which doesn’t come naturally to anybody but university will help with that, it’s extremely different to school and college. Its extremely rewarding seeing students when they graduate and them being very different people to what they started out as in first year.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
Just to read as widely as possible, have a go at reading anything and be really open-minded with the reading, don’t approach anything with assumptions about it. Enjoy it, you basically have the best job at the minute, you have three years to develop an interest in Literature and to find what you’re passionate about. When I graduated I worked in a shop that sold low-quality art, I did office jobs and didn’t find anything I was interested in until I started teaching English. The closest thing I can get to doing a degree again is to work with people that are doing a degree. I think to be open-minded, be enthusiastic, get involved, and when you look back 20 years later you should look back with incredible fondness and happiness, it should be the best few years of your life. It is a big decision but I would always say to people to do it because it helps you grow empathy and helps you meet people outside your home town. I would warmly encourage anyone to do it especially at YSJ.
Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the literature department?
First and foremost, my colleagues and my students. I’ve worked in about four other institutions, some of them Russell Group, and some of them small like our university, but I’ve worked here twice. I came back partly because of my colleagues, because it’s really collegiate, and partly because of you guys. That’s what makes it worth getting up and coming to work, it’s the students.
Is it better working in a smaller university?
Hugely, I think the difference is the fact that we as teachers know students’ names, and I hope that they know us by name. In my experience with big universities, there are some staff students will never meet, and here that doesn’t happen.
What makes somebody a good English literature student?
It’s not about ability or even potential, it’s about a willingness to ask questions, and sometimes ask uncomfortable questions. A willingness to stick your head above the parapet and say I really love this, there’s pleasure in the text. Sometimes I think there’s a kind of anti-intellectual atmosphere isn’t there, like I’m getting a degree but to say that I’m really enjoying it is slightly not okay. So I love it when student say, I’m blown away by this, or, I’ve got my mum to read this, or I can’t stop reading. That, and more than anything, a willingness to be open minded, and to know that there’s no right or wrong reading.
What is your specialist subject?
My specialist subject is Caribbean literature and culture. I’m working on culinary cultures at the minute so that’s food in writing, not just literary writing, other kinds of writing like diaries, slave narratives, cookery books including Levi Roots. So, it’s a bit eccentric compared to everybody else here however I would argue, and I think my students would also argue, that it’s very relevant because it’s about here and our Britain, not just about out there and the Caribbean, and it is absolutely not all about tourism and reggae and rum, although we talk about those things too.
How did you become interested in this particular subject?
It’s a bit of a strange one, my best friend when I was growing up in the whitest, smallest Oxfordshire town you could imagine, her parents came from Jamaica and from Trinidad respectively, and he, the father, used to tell her Ananci Stories about the west African spider god, spider king, that travelled from Africa to the Caribbean with the slaves. They couldn’t bring very much, they brought their bodies, and they brought their culture, and one of the things they brought was an Ananci story. As a six year old I didn’t know this, but I felt there’s a world of something out there and I’m not being told about this at school or in my town, and I want to know about it. So when I went off to do my undergraduate degree at the university of Kent, I discovered that there was a whole degree dedicated to this, that I hadn’t applied for, so I tried to get on it and they wouldn’t have me, however I used to kind of guerrilla attack their lectures and turn up anyway and made friends with people on the course, and some of those people were up and coming young Caribbean writers based here in Britain, and that’s where the love affair started really.
What is your favourite book?
It would have to be something by Derek Walcott, a Saint Lucian poet who died a couple of days ago. He was the grand old age of 87 but we all wanted him to go on for 187 years. He started writing and publishing when he was just 18, so that’s a lifetime of writing, and it would be a long poem called Another Life in which he says that to be a poet wasn’t a job or a choice, it was a vocation, it was like a religious vocation and in this autobiographical poem he remembers going up into the mountains in Saint Lucia and falling down and crying and realising that actually his life would be dedicated to this. He wanted to be a painter but it didn’t work out so he became a poet and we’re so glad. So it would be Derek Walcott, Another Life.
Any advice for prospective students?
Come and read as much as you can, borrow, beg, not steal necessarily, but read more than you’re being asked to read if you can. And more than that, don’t just be a student and a scholar, come and do other things, come and have fun, that’s so important. I’ve noticed over the 26 years I’ve been teaching, students are more and more focused on their part-time jobs because they need them, it’s not a choice, and sometimes the joy of just being 18 or 20 or whatever gets lost in the work, uni, work, uni, work routine. So I would say two of those things, read widely, but also enjoy other things that you might not have gotten the opportunity to do.
Dr Kaley Kramer
What do you enjoy about working at York St John and in the Literature department?
One of the best things about working here is the collegial atmosphere. This is a very young, very energetic, very dynamic and engaged team, and we have quite a lot of encouragement to pursue different or novel or new aspects of literature. There’s quite a lot of freedom here in terms of what we’re approaching as literature and what we encourage the students to bring. Also, we’re a small team and a small university, which means that I know my students really well. That’s really helpful when you’re trying to teach people things.
What makes somebody a good English Literature student?
Interest! If there’s one thing that I cannot teach, it is interest. If you are not interested in literature, don’t study it. Don’t study it because you want to be a teacher in three years; you will spend three years in hell and put everyone else through it as well. I can take someone who’s uninterested and make them a better writer because that’s a skill, but if you’re not engaged and not going to show up, then there’s not much I can do. Being interested and willing to work is the golden combination. And the great thing is that I’ve come across that more in this institution than in any other institution I’ve worked in. I hope that it’s something we encourage, but, broadly speaking, I find that my students here will work, and there’s nothing that will earn better results than graft.
What is your specialist subject?
My specialist subject is eighteenth-century literature. That’s where most of my research focuses. I did my PhD in eighteenth-century women’s novels and questions of legal identity, ownership, and property. I studied people from Charlotte Lennox to Mary Wollstonecraft to Charlotte Smith to Charlotte Dacre (quite a lot of Charlottes) and looked at how their writing intersected with legal writing, parliamentary writing, and history especially. Then the other thing that I do is Gothic. I look predominantly at eighteenth-century Gothic, although my latest publication on Gothic literature was actually about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’m currently looking at writing something on a couple of American television series, Sleepy Hollow and Supernatural. I’m very lucky in that the Gothic has proven so popular and is a perennial favourite with students, so there’s so much to look at. My real bread and butter is the eighteenth-century, but one of my side interests is in contemporary manifestations and contemporary adaptations of Gothic literature. I’m lucky that I get to teach both here.
When or how did you become interested in that particular subject?
It was really my MA, which is the point where you’re kind of allowed to develop a specialism, whereas at undergraduate you do literally everything. In Canada, undergraduate degrees are a standard four years, although I actually took five. For my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, I actually started in film, then I switched to classics and archaeology, then history and then English Literature. It took me a very long time to settle down in English Literature, probably because, most of my life, people told me that’s what I would do, so I spent quite a lot of my late teens and early twenties determinedly doing everything except English Literature. Then I came around to it. When I decided to do an MA, I wanted to do posthumanist science-fiction, so very contemporary and very recent. Then, when I got to the University of Windsor to do my MA, I did a course called Gothic Closets and another in eighteenth-century literature. That was the first time I actually had exposure to either, because my degree at Queen’s was very traditional. It wasn’t until then that I realised ‘oh, there’s all this other stuff you can read, including ‘Dracula’ and Stevenson and crazy things’. I eventually combined both during my PhD at the University of Leeds, where my dissertation topic was eighteenth-century Gothic.
Have you always wanted to teach?
Yes, but it would be more accurate to say that I always wanted to be at university. Something magical for me happens when someone shows up in a seminar room. I think it’s choice; I have to believe that my students are self-selecting and want to be there. My experience of anything before university was just like ‘Oh God, I have to be here’, which is never great for learning. So yeah, I always knew that I wanted to be an academic. But it’s not an easy profession. I’ve been unbelievably lucky to find a job first of all in Yorkshire and secondly in a university that has such a dedicated commitment to students as opposed to research. I mean, there’s some world-class, fantastic research going on at this institution, but we’ve got a lot more flexibility. We’re able to put students first rather than chasing research grants and research funding.
What’s your favourite book and why?
My favourite book to teach is probably ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ by Laurence Sterne. It’s an incredibly difficult book, but it’s remarkable because it’s one of those texts that people are very unlikely to read outside of a university classroom and it’s such a sense of accomplishment to read it. I also really love teaching ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson, which just works a dream in Gothic & Horror. At home, beside my bed, I currently have an annotated, scholarly edition of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ by L. M. Montgomery, which is one of my favourite books to read for pleasure. I’ve read it quite a bit; I reread stuff compulsively. And I do love eighteenth-century novels. The longer and more twisted and ridiculous the better. ‘The Female Quixote’ by Charlotte Lennox is one of my favourites – it’s an astonishing book from the middle of the eighteenth-century – and I’ve recently been reviewing some unpublished eighteenth-century novels which are great. Beyond that, I really read a lot more comic books and play a lot more video games than I do reading. I’ve recently replayed Skyrim, Fallout, and BioShock for the stories. In terms of graphic novels, I love ‘The Sandman’ by Neil Gaiman; I just started reading those again and they’re absolutely fantastic. I also watch a lot of television. ‘The Walking Dead’ is one of my top ten graphic novels, and the show is still putting out hit after hit.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
If I had a list of rules, the first one would be don’t be afraid to be interested. Sometimes I get the sense that students are worried that being too excited will make them look weird, whereas university is the place where we would love it if you would just geek out over whatever it is you’re talking about. Be enthusiastic and be honest and open with yourself. Think really carefully about what it is that you want, and remember that university is so much more than any of the time you’re going to spend with me. The degree is why you’re here and the degree is going to be made up of the classes you go to, but university is the whole thing. It’s the Students Union and the library and the discussions with your friends until 3am about things that you’ll never talk about again in the same way. Think carefully about why you want to be here and what you want to do and what you can bring to it.
Dr Adam Stock
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the Literature department?
So what I really enjoy about ysj is that it has a small community, everyone knows each other and everyone knows their students, you engage quite personally with them, you can see their development from first year to third year. It’s also a great department, wonderful colleagues that get on really well and it’s fun planning all together, it’s just a good place to work
What makes somebody a good English Literature student?
It’s not about what they know, not about what books they’ve read in the past, how many of the great classics, it’s about the desire to learn and the desire to engage, someone who will go and do the reading and is interested enough in English literature and going beyond that and finding out what really interests them and people will come back with some original thought and insight to engage with critics and the primary reading.
What is your specialist subject?
I am towards the end of writing a book on dystopian fiction and my PHD was on utopian and dystopian fiction and I worked a little on science fiction more generally and then my next project after this will be on modernism.
When did you become interested in that particular subject?
I was never a big science fiction fan until about my undergraduate degree when I was doing history and politics and my dissertation was on how you can make political arguments through the form of a novel what is it about this form of writing that make these people use the form of a novel instead of just writing a book on philosophy. From there I went on to do an MA on cultural history to think a bit more about other people who have done similar things. That led me onto my PHD and underpinning both my interest in modernism and science fiction, utopian and dystopian with linking the question of form and political arguments.
What is your favourite book and why?
I can’t really give a favourite book, it depends what form you’re talking about, if someone’s talking about my specialist area, about dystopian fiction, I always say ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin, he’s a Russian author, he lived in Newcastle during the First World War. It is a kind of modernism text and has beautiful imagery and is beautifully written, it also inspired a lot of other writers including Orwell and Vonnegut. There are also plenty of other authors of modernism that are very good.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
You need to decide whether you really want to go to university, whether it is just because you’re friends are going or whether you have a special interest in further learning. My advice would be to come to YSJ because it is just great, it is a small university so you have to think whether you want a city centre university or a large campus outside the city. If you want a nice and small community then YSJ would be a great decision. In terms of choosing English Literature you have to enjoy reading but you’ve also got to enjoy thinking about questions about the text and why the writer has chosen to do things that way and about political arguments, about art and literature and the social problems that we talk about in literature. Why is literature itself so important in all its various forms, if you have a curiosity in these questions then English literature is great for you.
Dr Adam Smith
What do you enjoy about working at YSJ and in the lit department?
I enjoy everything about it, in a way. The ideal for me is a job where you can balance research and teaching and to an extent public engagement, getting the work that we do out into the world. This is a brilliant place to do that. It’s a really creative environment to be in. The teaching is my favourite bit and I think the students here are phenomenal and fun. It’s enjoyable to discuss texts with them and to get to know people and help them through their journey. Also, the staff here are really friendly and really creative. For instance, I decided to try and write a play about robots because in ‘Imaginary Worlds’, we spent so much time talking about robots. I’d never written a play before, never had any interest in writing a play but I just thought I’d try, I was quite embarrassed because I don’t really do much creative stuff. Then Liesl King said “That sounds amazing! Let me read it”. Then within a few days, a few people had read it. Now I’m getting all this feedback and everyone is really supportive. I don’t think it’s hard to imagine a working environment where if the local eighteenth century-ist has written a play about robots, he’d become a figure of fun. But that wasn’t what I found. Everyone was hugely supportive. It’s an honest belief of mine that you can have a one million pound library or you can have all these great resources but you can’t beat conversation. Talking to people, sharing your ideas, getting feedback occasionally and developing your ideas. I can’t over emphasise the impact the conversations I have in seminars have on my thinking process and on the way I approach my research. It’s a huge privilege to go into a room for eight or ten hours a week and have so many people to talk and listen to.
What makes somebody a good English Literature student?
I think everyone has the potential to be a good English Literature student. You can tell if someone who has decided to an English Literature degree has decided to do it for good reasons. I think you can tell if people are prepared to learn, if they’re open minded and if they are really interested in it. You’d think if you were going to put yourself into tremendous amounts of debt and make the sacrifice of taking time out of your life to spend three years doing a subject, you must be profoundly invested in that subject. I think the vast majority of people are or at least interested in knowing more about it. So, I think that really helps. But I feel like when you teach the whole span even students who are perhaps less engaged at the beginning or less sure why they’ve made this decision, by the end of it you can see people changing and becoming more engaged. I think even if you weren’t the strongest or the most committed student, hopefully the experience would change you in a positive way. A good English student needs to be open minded, engaged, open to debate, prepared to change their positon on things. But also be prepared to have a position- that’s the most important thing. I think to have the courage to take a line on things, even if you’re not going to be sure about it in a few minutes time.
What is your specialist subject?
My specialist subject is political writing, published in the eighteenth century. My PHD research was about early eighteenth century political writing. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and periodicals that were actually paid for by political parties but didn’t say so. For instance I spent a lot of time looking at a publication called ‘The Freeholder’ which is all about how to be a good owner of property and how to manage a property and your estate and be a good gentleman. They were actually paid for by the wig ministry, which was one of the two main political groups at the time. So I was interested in how that allegiance manifested itself. Basically, I concluded that all these texts were functioning as propaganda. So that was my PHD, then when I finished that, although I’d looked at wig and Tory newspapers from all over London. The one thing they all had in common is they all defy themselves in contrast to the image of the North. So whether you’re a wig or a tory, the good gentleman is not from the North. Then I decided “What were these papers like in the North?”. I found that irksome, it bothered me- I’m from the North. I had a look at these newspapers in Sheffield and York- that’s what I’m working on at the moment. They’re much more openly radical and much more critical of government. One the things I’ve been talking about this week is how they use poetry as well. So how they use poetry to present their radical opinions. The papers that I’m looking at allegedly harvested poems from people in Yorkshire and printed them. So there was a section in the Sheffield Iris called Poetry Corner. But they actually called it the Repository of Genius which is quite a humble title. It would have poems in there written by people from Yorkshire and they were really angry. Which is how I ended up looking at protest.
Is that something you’ve always been interested in? or did it develop through studying?
That’s a really good question. I think this is true for a lot of people, I didn’t realise it was until later. I did my degree and all I knew was that I was quite good at English at school and I wanted to do more of it. The main decision that I made was “I seem to be quite good at this so I’ll do some more”. I did modules on the eighteenth century on my undergraduate degree and I really warmed to that period. Most of the things we take for granted today, modernity as we recognise it, is born or sold on the streets of London and other places in the eighteenth century. I found it quite interesting to go back to a point where all of the things like advertising, marketing, serialised story telling and all of these things were in their infancy. So that interested me, so then at the end of the degree, I decided to do an MA specifically in eighteenth century studies. Again, just because I felt like I wasn’t done yet and I wanted to know more about it. Then writing my MA dissertation which was about early eighteenth century novels led to me looking at how these novels were advertised which led me to the newspapers which I wrote my PHD on. I kind of fell for the eighteenth century over a staggered period but I think the issues in the project we’re looking at now, issues about social injustice and the government not being able to account and opportunities for more people. I think I come from a broadly working class background and I think I’ve always considered myself in the back of my mind as a class warrior. But I didn’t actually realise that was what was going on until I looked back over all of those things. I think it is something I was interested in but didn’t realise maybe all the way through.
What is your favourite book?
The book that I’ve enjoyed the most is a relatively contemporary novel called ‘The Stranger’s Child’ by Alan Hollinghurst. It’s a tome, it’s like five or six hundred pages. It’s a bit like ‘Atonement’ in that it starts with a moment of misunderstanding at the start of twentieth century. It traces that through different generations and it’s set in this country house and there’s loads of characters. There’s sections that involve academia and academic publication which in a really nerdy way, I got a real kick out of. It was just beautifully written and it has that soft revisionist agenda as well. It’s about decentralising our understanding of recent history. It looks at people’s experiences who aren’t necessarily the straight, white, middle class man. It takes a long time to read though, I’d probably say that’s my favourite book.
Do you have any advice for prospective students?
I think prospective students should read ‘Paradise Lost’ before they arrive. It won’t necessarily be taught on the degree. If they want their lives to be fractionally easier, they should make sure they have a pretty good understanding of Shakespeare, read Paradise Lost (if they can) and also maybe google the Bible a little bit. The whole canon of literature never gets over the Bible, Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. If I could go back in time that’s what I would tell myself on a purely practical level. On a less practical level I would just recommend that they relax and look forward to investing a few years in something that they are profoundly interested in. Also, to prepare to make the most of it and remember that it’s not just all about reading books and writing essays. There’s this huge pressure for university to be the best years of your life but I do think it’s a gateway to do all these different things you might not even have considered as part of and in addition to the degree. So, I would tell them to relax and get ready to have some opinions.
Interviews conducted by Rachel Hancock, Sophie Richardson, Eleanor Squires, and Elisha Wise.