Event Details

Maria Christou (Manchester) and Joel Evans (Nottingham) present papers on their recent research in contemporary literature.

Maria Christou (University of Manchester): 'Rachel Cusk's Transparency'

Joel Evans (University of Nottingham): 'Wolf Hall and Democratic Style'

Maria Christou is a Presidential Fellow in the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She works on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her first monograph, Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.Her current research project, The Turn to the Potential: Literature and the Intellectual Legacy of the Cold War, attempts to tell the story of the ‘turn to the potential’ as it emerges from the literary imagination of the second half of the C20th century to the present day, and will explore its implications on questions like action, agency, and freedom.

Joel Evans is Assistant Professor in Literature at the University of Nottingham. His first monograph was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press, and is entitled Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory. He is currently working on a new book-length project provisionally entitled Visions of the Collective: Democracy and Fiction in the 21st Century. The book will explore a resurgence of figurations of the collective form in contemporary culture, whilst interrogating how these figurations bear on the question of democracy.