The Summer School Tutors

Modernism

Mark Bolsover

Mark recently submitted his PhD-thesis in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Dr Simon Malpas. His research focuses on a comparison of James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular on the concept of the ironic self-creation of the artist and the ways in which both writers appropriate and reconfigure Romantic conceptions of artistic inspiration for peculiarly antiRomantic ends...

Mark currently works as a Teaching Assistant within the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, teaching second year degree students on the MA English literature course and also as Visiting Lecturer in Critical Theory in The School of Drama and Creative Industries at Queen Margaret University.

Evan Smith

Evan's research interests center on the relationship between literature and philosophy, specifically the ontology of the literary work of art. He has received joint funding (2009-13) through the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, the Overseas Research Scholarship Scheme (ORS), and the University of St Andrews in support of his current dissertation addressing the relation of Samuel Beckett's aesthetic project to the Phenomenological tradition embodied in the writing of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Gianni Vattimo and others. His research is, to a certain extent, informed by the work of the Frankfurt School with a special interest in the writing of Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas as well as more contemporary cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Simon Critchley. He has presented widely at conferences from 2006 onward in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland on a range of topics relating to Critical Theory, Continental Philosophy, 20th Century Literature, and Aesthetics.

Maria-Daniella Dick 

Maria was awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow in December 2010. Her research, funded by the AHRC, focused on Dante, James Joyce and Jacques Derrida, and she is currently writing a book on the same topic. Her research interests concern the interstices between literature, theory and philosophy, especially in the thinking and writing of modernity. Maria is looking forward to returning to the University of Edinburgh, where she had a scholarly interlude between undergraduate and Masters study to gain an accelerated LLB, before returning to Glasgow for postgraduate work. She tutors in English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow and is a Visiting Staff member of Glasgow School of Art. She has a new book forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press; co-authored with Julian Wolfreys, it is entitled The Derrida Wordbook.

Ben Davies

Ben recently submitted his PhD thesis in the School of English, the Universityof St Andrews. This research focuses on the relationship between sex, time and space in contemporary fiction. He received his MA in English from the University of St Andrews and his MSt in Language and Literature (1900-Present) from the University of Oxford.

He is the co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011). Ben’s wider research interests include the relationship between philosophy and literature, representations of sexual behaviour, theories and representations of time and space, critical theory and modern and contemporary literature. At St Andrews, Ben teaches nineteenth-, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, literary theory, gender studies and the history of ideas.

Scottish Literature 1900-Present

Russell Jones

Russell is an Edinburgh-based writer, editor and tutor. He is currently completing his PhD whilst tutoring in Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University. Russell's poetry is widely published and his collection of science fiction poems, The Last Refuge, was published in 2009 (Forest Press). He is the editor of a book of contemporary science fiction poems from the UK (due 2012) and guest editor for The Interdisciplinary Science Review. Russell's research interests are in contemporary poetry and poetic form, and he has given talks across the UK on the interactions of science and literature. He currently co-moderates writersdock.org's poetry department and writes travel articles for exploration-online.co.uk.

Corey Gibson

Corey is currently completing his PhD thesis with the English Literature Department at the University of Edinburgh. It is concerned with the work of the poet, songwriter, folklorist, and political and cultural commentator, Hamish Henderson (1919-2002). Having studied Scottish History and Literature at undergraduate level, Corey's postgraduate research has allowed him to explore his interests in twentieth century Scottish poetry, the interwar Scottish Literary Renaissance, and the cultural-political visions of Scottish writers in the early and mid twentieth century. Corey works as a tutor on the first year Scottish Literature course at Edinburgh, and has also led seminars on contemporary Scottish writing for teachers of English from across the EU for the International Studies Programme.

Contemporary Literature

Tom Farrington

Tom gained an MA (Hons) in English Literature and an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, where he is currently studying for a PhD. His thesis is on aesthetics and politics in the work of Sherman Alexie, a contemporary Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian writer, poet and filmmaker. Other research interests include the literature of the American South, representations of monstrosity, and narratives of trauma.

Tom has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at South East European University in Macedonia, and currently works in Academic Support at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University.

Francesca Lotti

Francesca graduated fromMilan State University, where she received a PhD in British Literature and Drama in 2006. Her research project concerned the contaminations and cross-pollination of Japanese culture and traditions on British visual arts and drama between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century.

After publishing essays on modernist theatre and visual arts, she has lately focused on postmodern drama from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Sarah Kane, Douglas Maxwell and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Her biggest interest explores multicultural hybridity in contemporary British theatre, and that's why she feels so privileged to return to SUISS and enjoy such a multicultural and enriching experience!

Michael Rodgers

Michael is currently in the final stages of his PhD looking at the ways in which Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy interacts with a number of key literary, and ethical, problems of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction. He works as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Strathclyde where, this year, he helped to deliver the ‘Twentieth-Century Literature’ module. His article ‘Lolita’s Nietzschean Morality’ was published in Philosophy and Literature last year and he has another two forthcoming – one on the idea of appropriation in Bob Dylan’s lyrics and the other on Nabokov’s posthumous novel The Original of Laura. He is a contributor to The Literary Encyclopedia, the Slavonic and East European Review and the Nabokov Online Journal and is currently editing a volume (tentatively titled) Nabokov’s Morality Play derived from a conference that he organized last year.

Creative Writing

Claire Askew

Claire's work has appeared in a variety of major publications including Poetry Scotland, The Edinburgh Review, Textualities and The Guardian. In 2008 she was awarded the Grierson Verse Prize, the Sloan Prize for Writing in Lowland Scots Vernacular, the Lewis Edwards Award for Poetry and the William Sharpe Hunter Memorial Scholarship for Creative Writing. She was also nominated for the Scottish Variety Best Young Scottish Writer of the Year Award in 2009, and has been longlisted for an Eric Gregory Award.

Claire's poems have appeared in two of the Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems of the Year anthology. She is also a regular on the Edinburgh performance poetry circuit, and has appeared at various Edinburgh festivals, In 2009 Claire won the Scottish Poetry Library's Sotto Voce Slam. Her pamphlet The Mermaid and the Sailors is published by Red Squirrel Press.

Claire has a MA (Hons) in English Literature, a MSc in Creative Writing and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Scottish Poetry, all with the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working as a Lecturer in Literature and Communications at Edinburgh's Telford College.

Helen Sedgwick

Helen Sedgwick is a freelance writer and literary editor based in Glasgow. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2012 and is currnetly working on a short story collection and a novel. Her short fiction and non-fiction can be read in Litro, Algebra, Pank, Novel Magazine and Nature, among others, and she was shortlisted in the Spilling Ink fiction prize and the Imagining Scotland national short story competition in 2011.

As an editor, Helen has worked with publishers including Freight Books, Cargo Publishing and McSweeney's. She is co-founding editor of Fractured West magazine (fracturedwest.com), review editor of Gutter magazine (guttermag.co.uk) and co-host of Words Per Minute (wordsperminute.org.uk). She teaches creative writing for the University of Glasgow, and has performed her work at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and Glasgow's Aye Write. She was awarded her MSci from the University of Bristol, her MLitt from the University of Glasgow and her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. You can say hello at helensedgwick.com.

Jane Alexander

 Jane originally trained as an illustrator,but swapped sketchbooks for notebooks several years ago. Since then she's published short stories and creative non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies including Litro, Mslexia, New Writing Scotland, ImagiNation: Stories of Scotland’s Future and A Wilder Vein; been awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Bursary; and gained an M.Phil in creative writing from the University of Glasgow. Her focus is on writing novels and short fiction, with recent forays into screenwriting with Screen Academy Scotland and writing for radio with BBC Scotland Radio Drama/Scottish Book Trust. Jane teaches creative writing in higher, further, adult and community education: she's an Associate Lecturer with the Open University; she runs a creative writing class for Transition, as part of a programme of training for recovered and recovering drug users; and she teaches evening and community education classes for the City of Edinburgh Council. She is represented by Lutyens & Rubinstein literary agents.