Joseph Williams

I am a CHASE / AHRC-funded postgraduate researcher within the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing.

I am writing a PhD thesis about the relationship between the university and literary culture in postwar Britain. I consider this by looking at 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. 

I have given papers related to my thesis research at conferences throughout the UK as well as in Frankfurt, Ghent, Melbourne, and New York. Please see my 'research outputs' tab for specific titles.

I work as a freelance journalist and have reviewed books for a number of London's weeklies and quarterlies including Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Tribune, and The Spectator.

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

In 2023 I was appointed reviews editor of Critical Quarterly. 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, students, journalists, or interested general readers - simply write to me at my UEA email.

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
• contemporary poetry 
• sport and its symbolic resonance, particularly in relation to masculinity
• The lyrics of Michael Stipe
• The fiction, essays, and reportage of Martin Amis
• Ulysses (...without the footnotes!)
• The Literature and Culture of the 'long' 1990s

• In Autumn 2022 I taught on the first year undergraduate module Reading Now.
• In January 2023 I taught a four-week short course on 'M. R. James in East Anglia' for the Norwich W. E. A. 
• In Autumn 2023 I taught a ten-week module for the Norwich W. E. A. titled 'Crime Through Time'
• In Spring 2024 I taught a ten-week module for the Norwich W. E. A. titled 'Ulysses in ten weeks'
• I am currently putting together a module on 'Literature and Culture of the 1990s'. The 'long 1980s' has been thought about at length, but the 'long 1990s' has been less talked about, less theorised. Texts will include, among others, Martin Amis, London Fields (1989), Nirvana, Nevermind (1991), the Premier League (1992-onwards), Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994), Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997), Wes Craven, Scream 2 (1997), Lorna Sage, Bad Blood (2000).