The English Department is delighted that Timothy Gao, Noreen Masud and Florian Stadtler will be joining the Department in January, bringing new expertise in Victorian prose fiction, twentieth-century prose fiction and Literature and Migration. 

Timothy Gao is joining us from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  His research explores the history, ethics, and aesthetics of virtual reality in nineteenth-century fiction. He is particularly interested in how Victorian novels produce highly concretised experiences of imaginary objects and spaces, and why these experiences matter. His first book, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.  Dr Gao will be teaching units on Victorian fiction and the novel.

Noreen Masud is currently at Durham University.  Her recent publications include 'D. H. Lawrence's Queer Flatness’ in Textual Practice, and 'Flat Stevie Smith' in Twentieth Century Literature, and her book Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism will be published next year by Oxford University Press.  More generally she is interested in aphorism, flatness and puppets. Dr Masud is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, and will be teaching twentieth century literature.

Florian Stadtler most recently spent 8 years at the University of Exeter.  His main research interests lie in literature and migration, colonial and postcolonial literature and film, especially South Asian writing in English, the works of Salman Rushdie, British South Asian film, history and literature, Indian cinema and its representation in fiction, and East African literatures as they relate to colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory.  His publications include Fiction Film and Indian Popular Cinema: Salman Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination (2014).   Dr Stadtler is also the editor of Salman Rushdie in Context, forthcoming in 2022, and Reviews Editor for Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing.

We look forward to their arrival!