Research Interests

John Schad is currently working on a book called The Ghost of Virginia Woolf: A Phantom History of Eng. Lit. (the first chapter is out with SubStance). His previous authored books are: Walter Benjamin's Ark (UCL Press), Derrida | Benjamin. Two Plays for the Stage [with Fred Dalmasso] (Palgrave), Paris Bride. A Modernist Life (Punctum), The Late Walter Benjamin (Bloomsbury), Someone Called Derrida (Sussex), Arthur Hugh Clough (Northcote House), Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Joyce (Sussex), Victorians in Theory (Manchester UP), and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors (Macmillan). His edited books are: Dickens Refigured (Manchester UP); Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (Penguin); Writing the Bodies of Christ (Routledge); Crrritic! (Sussex); and life.after.theory (Continuum). This last book included new interviews with Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi, and Christopher Norris.

Professor Schad was the subject of the 2024 CounterText Interview (CounterText 10.2), has had two retrospectives published, Hostage of the Word (2013) andJohn Schad in Conversation (2015), has read his work on BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’ and at various festivals, and his plays have been performed at The Oxford Playhouse, Watford Palace Theatre, HowTheLight GetsIn, and the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.

In 2026 he was made a Fellow of the International Institute for Literature and the Arts.

• ‘John Schad's critical-creative writing is synonymous with the genre.’ (Countertext, August 2021)
• ‘The extraordinary works of John Schad seamlessly, breathlessly, blend memoir with fiction with philosophy, literary theory and criticism’ (Offshoot: Contemporary Life-Writing, 2018)
• ‘Critical essays rarely merit description as creative acts , one exception to that rule is the work of John Schad’ (Mark Knight in Literature and Theology, 2012)
• ‘The modern theoretical re-evaluation of literature has given way to a renewed interest in religious questions. The religiously inflected critical inquiry of writers such as Geoffrey Hartman, Luce Irigaray, J. Hillis Miller, Terry Eagleton, and John Schad has developed this tradition.’ (The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, 2012).