Matthew Taunton

I was born in London and studied English Literature at University College London at BA and MA level. I then joined the London Consortium, at Birkbeck College, where I wrote a PhD about representations of mass housing in literature and film. I taught various subjects at Birkbeck, UCL, Goldsmiths College, Central St. Martins, Camberwell School of Art, and the Open University (often in the same week), before starting a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London in 2010. In 2012, I was appointed to a lectureship at UEA where I have worked ever since. 

I have broad interests in the literature, politics, art, and culture of the twentieth century. I often write about the entanglement of literature and politics, and about the 'long' 1930s, in which writers became particularly consicous of that entanglement. I am the author of  Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (2019) and and Fictions of the City (2009), and co-editor of A History of 1930s British Literature (2019) with Benjamin Kohlmann and The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith (2024), with my UEA colleague Rachel Potter.

My forthcoming book The Collective Voice: Modern Literature and the Politics of Speech 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 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. The Collective Voice will be published by Stanford University Press.

I have served in a number of administrative roles at UEA: LDC's 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 co-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. 

• Director of Postgraduate Research, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, 2017-2020
• UEA lead, CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, 2017-2020
• Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, 2020-2023
• Director of Research, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, 2024-2029