Dr Richard Robinson

Richard has taught throughout the literature programmes at Swansea for the last seventeen years, with a focus on modernism (especially James Joyce, on whose work he runs an MA module), contemporary fiction, literary theory and philosophy. He has supervised a number of PhD projects to completion on modernism and on contemporary writing. He is currently Programme Director for the MA in English Literature and a section lead for Research Excellence Framework (REF 2029). He has acted as BA Programme Director, Exams Officer and Admissions Officer. He organises regular panels and papers for the Creative-Critical Group, including recent sessions on autofiction, adaptations, queer writing and translation.
He often takes part in school outreach and public engagement events (here and here).

Richard works throughout twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, with a particular interest in modernism and its afterlives, Irish writing and the modern literature of European borderlands. Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007) explores how central European border spaces were transmuted into the overdetermined settings of modernist writing. John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017) asks how and why McGahern’s fiction, sometimes approached as a documentary form of belated Irish naturalism, conceals and reveals the traces of literary modernism. He also works on Kazuo Ishiguro (here and here) and has written variously on Italo Svevo, Rebecca West, Ian McEwan, Elena Ferrante and Edward St Aubyn.