University of Glamorgan

Dr Martin Willis

Reader in English Literature
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Tel 01443 483491
Room: Ferndale 107

Qualifications

MA, PhD (Edinburgh)

About

I arrived at Glamorgan in September 2003 having previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Worcester.

The majority of my teaching is in nineteenth century literature. I teach the second year undergraduate module, Nineteenth Century Literature, and two modules on the Gothic Studies MA course, Transforming the Gothic: Victorian Popular Genres and Science and the Gothic. I have secondary teaching interests in American Literature and in Crime Fiction. I teach the first year undergraduate module, Reading Fiction: The American Short Story, and half of the third year undergraduate module Genre Fiction (on 19th and 20th century crime narrative). I am also module leader for the first year undergraduate module, Writing Essays.

I supervise a number of undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations each year. Recently I have supervised work on: Medicine and the Asylum in Nineteenth-century Fiction, Late Victorian Urban Gothic, Dickens and London, and Apothecaries and Doctors in the work of Jane Austen.

Duties & Responsibilities

Subject Leader for English Literature

Research

My main research interests lie in the intersections between Victorian literature and science. The dialogues and debates that occur in both the emerging sciences and the literary fiction of the period fascinate me. In particular I am interested by the literary imaginations response to marginal sciences such as mesmerism and spiritualism, and by literature’s interrogation of scientific sites and conflicts, from the laboratory and seance room to debates in disease theory and vivisection controversies.
Presently I am working on a book entitled Hoodwinked: The Power of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. This is an interdisciplinary study of literature, science, and culture in the Victorian period. Its primary focus is the changing nature of vision as engineered by scientific discovery. Drawing on science, technology, and literature, Hoodwinked aims to analyse the interaction between science, sight and the literary imagination in order to understand better how vision was continually transformed as its boundaries were breached by scientific and technological innovation.

I presently hold the Editorship of the Journal of Literature and Science, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship exploring the cross-fertilisation between literature and science across all literary periods.

I am also Co-Director (with Professors Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace) of the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts, and Science, founded with HEFCW support in 2006. RCLAS runs an annual conference (the first one in August 2007), an online peer-reviewed journal, and supports through its website and various other small projects the interdisciplinary study of literature and science and the arts and science.

I am presently co-supervising with Professor Andrew Smith one PhD student, working on Gothic and travel writing, and would be happy to supervise doctoral students on any aspect of nineteenth-century literature and science or on Victorian gothic, science fiction or detective fiction.

Selected Publications

Books:

Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006)

The Victorian Literature Handbook ed. with Alex Warwick (Continuum Press, 2008)

Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History ed. with Alex Warwick (Manchester University Press, 2007)

Victorian Literary Mesmerism ed. with Catherine Wynne (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi Press, 2006)

Repositioning Victorian Sciences Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thinking, ed. with David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge and Alex Warwick (London: Anthem Press, 2006)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“Le Fanu’s 'Carmilla’, Ireland, and Diseased Vision” in Essays and Studies 2008: Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008): 111-30.

“The Invisible Giant, Dracula, and Disease”, Studies in the Novel 39:3 (2007): 301-25

“Science, Economics and Authorship in George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil”, Journal of Victorian Culture 10:2 (2005): 184-209.

“Hard-wear: the millennium, technology and Brosnan’s Bond” in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, ed. Christoph Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003): 151-65

“Weird Science”, Victorian Review 26:1 (2000): Volume Editor and Intro, 1-5.

Professional Memberships

Founding Member (and former Membership Secretary) for the British Society for Literature and Science

Organiser and Chair of the BAVS-funded Victorian Studies Seminar in Wales (VSSW)

Member of the Committee for the Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies, situated at St. Deiniols Library, Hawarden.

Member of the British Association for Victorian Studies

External representation

Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Literature and Science

External Examiner for MA in English at Birmingham City University (2007-)

Former external examiner for undergraduate English at Bath Spa University (2005-2009)

Peer Reviewer for Journal of Victorian Culture, Studies in the Novel, and Victorian Review as well as for Edinburgh and Manchester University Presses.

Reviewer for Gothic Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Metascience and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée

Consultancy

Recent Invited Lectures and Seminars:

Plenary lecture, 'On Wonder’, Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century Conference, University of Edinburgh, February 2010

Seminar, 'Optics and Egyptology’, Nottingham Trent University, March 2009

Seminar, 'Le Fanu’s 'Carmilla’, the Microscope and Theories of Disease’, University of Hull, November 2008

Recent Public Engagement Activities:

Lead discussion on Radio 4’s Science Programme, 'Leading Edge’, September 10, 2009
Listen Again

Lecture, 'Literature in the early years of the BAAS’, British Science Festival, Guildford, September 2009