Matt Taunton

I have broad interests in the literature, politics, art, and culture of the twentieth century.

My current project investigates the phenomenon of collective speech - speaking in unison - in a broad historical perspective. It situates modern literature's fascination with collective speech in relation to notions of the chorus that go back to Ancient Greece, as well as the liturgical practices of the Christian church, and anthropological ideas about chanting that associated it with (racialised) primitive cultures. I have published a number of articles around this topic (see publications below) and I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to pursue the project, which led to a number of public events and even some colletively-voiced street theatre. I am now finishing my next book, The Collective Voice: Twentieth-Century Literature and the Politics of Choral Speech, and co-editing The People: Belonging, Exclusion, Democracy, with Benjamin Kohlmann.

My other books are The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith (2024), co-edited with my UEA colleague Rachel Potter, Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (2019), A History of 1930s British Literature (2019) and Fictions of the City (2009).

I have served a number of administrative roles at UEA: School Director of Postgraduate Research, UEA Academic Lead for the AHRC-funded CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and now Director of Research for the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

Externally, I sit on the Research Diversity Advisory Panel for REF2029, and the AHRC Peer Review College. I am the Senior Deputy Editor of Critical Quarterly. Along with Janice Ho (UBC Vancouver) and Benjamin Kohlmann (Regensburg) I am series editor of a new book series with OUP, called 'Literature & Politics'. 

I have taught, convened and designed modules in a variety of areas across the school. For many years I co-taught (with my colleague the social historian Ben Jones) 'The Writing of History', an interdisciplinary, second-year module designed with students on the BA in Literature and History in mind, but open to students from both schools.