Joseph Williams

I am a British Academy Early Career Fellow based in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA. My project, ‘Malcolm Bradbury and the “serious” novel: creative writing, literary criticism and the archive, 1965-2000’ seeks to map and understand the legacy of novelist, critic and academic Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000), in particular how his creative, critical and educational work has shaped both Creative Writing pedagogy and the novel as a form in the second half of the twentieth century. As part of this work I will produce the first critical biography of Bradbury as well as a series of oral history interviews and an archival map of relevant material from the catalogued and uncatalogued collections of Bradbury’s vast network of students, colleagues and friends. 

Alongside my Fellowship, I am currently preparing for publication a monograph based on my PhD thesis, ‘Bridgeable Gaps: The Writer, the Critic, and the University, 1958-2000’ (University of East Anglia, 2025). This is a group study that considers the relationship between the university and literary culture in postwar Britain through the creative, critical and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge and the literary journal Critical Quarterly, founded by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson in 1959. Working in British universities, these figures engaged variously with television, public-facing magazines and secondary schools in an attempt to cultivate a plural and democratic literary culture. By foregrounding these figures, I hope to provide an alternative to previous Oxbridge-centred histories of the discipline and in doing so bring to light a new narrative of postwar literary culture. 

With Dr Denise Wong, I am co-editing a special issue of Critical Quarterly on ‘The University and the Contemporary Novel’, to be published in October 2027. As Stefan Collini observed in the London Review of Books in June 2026, British universities are ‘in deep trouble’, stuck in a pattern of ‘dilution, damage and decline’. Why, then, do writers and readers on both sides of the Atlantic continue to be intrigued and enamoured (as well as incensed) by the institution of the university and the work that takes place there? 

I have published articles and essays based on my research in academic journals and popular magazines, and I have given papers  at conferences throughout the UK as well as in Frankfurt, Ghent, Melbourne, and New York. Please see my research outputs tab for specific titles. As a critic, I have published reviews, essays and interviews in a number of magazines including the New Statesman, Literary Review, the London Magazine, UnHerd, the Times Literary Supplement, Tribune and The Spectator, among others. I share these pieces on my substack, https://lifeisnotanovel.substack.com. 

In 2023 I was appointed reviews editor of Critical Quarterly, where I also sit on the editorial board. I am always keen to receive pitches for reviews of academic or trade books (as well as films, albums, plays, dances, and other cultural activities) from academics, independent scholars, postgraduate researchers or MA students - simply write to me at my UEA email.

In 2022 I was Fiction judge for the East Anglian Book Awards.

My research interests include

• postwar British fiction, in particular the campus novel
• the fiction and criticism of Malcolm Bradbury
• modernism and its legacies
• contemporary British fiction
• the comic novel, humour, and the joke
• literary criticism and its history
• the history of university English studies, in particular Creative Writing
• the university's role as a literary tastemaker 
• the future of the university, in particular the Arts and Humanities
• F. R. Leavis and ideas about ‘high’ culture
• cultural studies
• journalism, book reviews, and the reading public
• Raymond Williams and the long revolution
• adult education, literacy, and the Workers' Education Association
• literary archives
• M. R. James, the ghost story, and non-mimetic writing
• sport and its symbolic resonance, particularly in relation to masculinity
• Ulysses
• The Literature and Culture of the ‘long’ 1990s

I have devised and taught various courses in various settings.

At UEA, I have taught seminars on the undergraduate module ‘Reading Now’ and I have lectured on the ‘Literature and the Humanities’ foundation year course.

For Norwich Lifelong Learning I have taught day-schools and longer courses on a variety of subjects, including:

• Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
• Summer holiday fiction (Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Celia Fremlin’s Uncle Paul, Rosemary Tonks’s Businessmen as Lovers, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac)
• Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man and David Lodge’s Changing Places
• Gothic fiction (the ghost stories of M. R. James, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s Inside No. 9)
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch

For the Workers’ Educational Association I have devised and taught a range of courses including:

• Ulysses in Ten Weeks
• M. R. James in East Anglia
• Crime fiction from Sherlock Holmes to Richard Osman
• English Poetry from Shakespeare to Today