Our staff
Professor Julian Wolfreys
Tel: +44 01509 222964
Role: Professor of Modern Literature and Culture
Email: J.Wolfreys@lboro.ac.uk
Room NN.0.22, Martin Hall Building, East Park
Publications
Research Interests
My research covers nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and literary theory. I am particularly interested in the poetics and politics of identity, the ontology of literary forms, the relation between historicity and being, modes of urban representation, and the poetics of spectrality and haunting. In the field of theory I focus especially on the text of Jacques Derrida, especially as this addresses issues of poetics, singularity, invention, alterity, ethics, acts of revenance and witnessing, and the tensions and intersections between Derridean discourse and psychoanalysis.
Undergraduate Teaching
I teach on 'Critical Studies' (Year One), I am Module Coordinator for 'Victorian Literature' (Year Two), as well as teaching the third year module on 'Writing of the 1950s'. Additionally, I teach modules on Thomas Hardy, Beckett and Pinter, and contribute generally to teaching on modules concerned with 19th - and 20th-century Literature.
Postgraduate
I am Research Coordinator and I am interested in teaching optional modules on 'History, Nation, and Difference', 'Victorian Extremes', 'Writing the Past', 'Modernist and Contemporary Genres'. I have also recently introduced new MA modules on Charles Dickens, and the interrelation between the work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. I would also welcome proposals for research on any aspects of Victorian and nineteenth-century literature and culture, Modernism and Edwardian literature, English literature from the 1950s to the present, and the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, or interdisciplinary aspects of continental thought from Husserl and Bergson to Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. I would also be keen to supervise interdisciplinary studies relating to topics such as representation, visuality, spectrality, the Gothic and national identity.
Recent Publications
Writing London vol. III: Inventions of the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed (London : Continuum, 2007); Dickens to Hardy 1832-1884: The Novel, the Past, and Cultural Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick 's Vision (Ohio State University Press, 2006); Occasional Deconstructions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004)
Research in progress
I am currently working on a study of Thomas Hardy and his interests in, and the influence on his writing of, continental and phenomenological research, as this informs the representation of the past in his novels. I am also compiling and editing a concordance and glossary of terms, proper names and publications in the works of Jacques Derrida. Other projects currently in progress include a study of transgression from Early Modern to Postmodern culture; a study of the relation between English national identity and the landscape; a collection of essays on the place of love in contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.