Dr Andrew Radford
- Senior Lecturer (English Literature)
telephone:
01413302133
email:
Andrew.Radford@glasgow.ac.uk
R314 Level 3, English Literature, 5 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QH
Research interests
Research interests
- European Modernism
- Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington and British Surrealism
- Poetry and Politics of the 1930s
- Post-1945 British fiction (Bowen, Spark, Pym, Compton-Burnett, Comyns, Quin)
- Paul Nash and British Art 1900-1940
- Book History and Textual Editing
- George Borrow and Travel Literature
- Contemporary Literature
Biography
Andrew teaches across a range of junior and senior honours courses in post-1900 Anglo-American Literature. He has also convened the Level 2 topic 'Writing and Text' and contributes to the postgraduate MLitt program in Modernities. Andrew is currently researching post-war British women writers such as Ann Quin and Anna Kavan and their decisive, though critically undervalued, contribution to the formally innovative 1960s novel. He has also published essays, narrative bibliographies, book chapters, and reviews on Katherine Mansfield, Mina Loy, Joseph Conrad, G. K. Chesterton, Sylvia Townsend Warner and May Sinclair.
Andrew has a long-standing research interest in progressive Scottish-Canadian translator, cultural pundit and anti-censorship campaigner John Calder (1927-2018). Calder co-created the International Writers' Conference held at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962, which featured a diverse array of authors such as Alexander Trocchi, Hugh MacDiarmid, Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller. Calder's political self-placement as countercultural gadfly, outspoken impresario and liberal activist triggered lively debates about experimental writing in the mid 1960s. Calder also relished, and exploited, his status as one of the most litigated against independent publishers of the mid-century. Andrew focuses primarily on Calder's endeavours as a bookseller of stridently controversial avant-garde magazines and novels, his interactions with fellow publishers Maurice Girodias (Olympia Press) in Paris and Barney Rosset (Grove Press) in New York. Calder's imprint, in addition to promoting Samuel Beckett's prose, poetry and critical writing, also introduced younger British audiences to the fiction of William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr.
Topics of completed and current doctoral research projects co/supervised include: eco-criticism, animal studies, and the imperial romance (John Miller); Hope Mirrlees, Jane Harrison and feminist classicism (Nina Enemark); post-1970s eco-cinema and literary adaptation (Djouher Benyoucef); Gothic fiction (Hilary Grimes); British writings on China 1890-1950 (Jacqueline Young and Kun Xi); the role of the adolescent in the fiction by Rosamond Lehmann, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen (Kathryn Johnson); Textile Orientalisms (Suchitra Choudhury); African women writers and gender politics (Sadia Zulfiqar); mapping the 'dark continent' (Robert McLaughlan); writing war (Stuart Hepburn); twentieth-century American fiction and the pastoral mode (Margarida Sao Bento Cadima); the nineteenth-century novel and critical theory (Martina Saric). Recent supervision in contemporary literature includes two AHRC-funded students in creative writing.
Research groups
- Modernities
Grants
AHRC Research Network 2016-
Popular Occulture in Britain 1875-1947
This project investigates the influence of occult beliefs, themes, and figures on British popular culture between 1875-1947.
The enterprise is led by Professor Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling) and Dr Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow)
https://www.stir.ac.uk/popular-occulture-in-britain
The accompanying essay collection The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947, eds. Ferguson and Radford, was published by Routledge in hardback and ebook formats in 2018:
Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner.
Supervision
- Alshammari, Aiman Mutlaq O
Representations of Domestic Violence in Popular Literature of the Nineteenth Century
Doctoral Students Past Projects.
PhD Supervision. Degrees awarded
Hilary Grimes, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2006). (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: 'Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing'.
Timothy Jarvis (AHRC funded), DPhil in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow (2009). (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘The Wanderer: Peregrinations in Eldritch Regions’.
John Miller (AHRC funded), DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2009). (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Colonial Discourse and Natural Environments in British Fiction of Empire, 1850-1940’.
Kathryn Johnson (AHRC funded), DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2010). (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘A Dangerous Age: Adolescent Agencies in Interwar British Literature’.
Robert McLaughlan (AHRC funded), DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2010). (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Imagined Blackgrounds: The Literary Legacy of Mapping the Dark Continent’.
Jacqueline Young, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2011). (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Western Residents of China and their Fictional Writings, 1890–1914’.
Choudhury, Suchitra, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2013). (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British literature’.
Sadia Zulfiqar Chaudhry, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2014). (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘African women writers and the politics of gender’.
Nina Enemark, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2015) (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Re-crossing the Ritual Bridge: Jane Ellen Harrison’s Theory of Art in the Work of Hope Mirrlees’.
Stuart Hepburn, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2015) (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ’17 Letters to My Brother: A Scottish Soldier Writes Home – Novella, Screenplay and Reflective Essay’
Alexandra Laura Foulds, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2017) (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Gothic monster fiction and the “novel-reading disease”, 1860-1900’.
Kun Xi, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2020) (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Mapping Out a “Folded City”: British Resident-travellers’ Writing on Peking, 1911–1939’
Margarida Sao Bento Cadima, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2021) (75 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Pastoral cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton’s fiction: the world is a welter’.
Alexandra, Abletshauser, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2023) (25 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘The Hearth of Reform. Discourses of Love and Strategies of Sympathy in Canadian Women’s Writing, 1890-1914’.
Carole Murphy, MPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2023) (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Walter de la Mare’s Gothic Strategies’.
Martina Saric, DPhil in English Literature, University of Glasgow (2025) (50 percent supervision)
Title of thesis: ‘Bodies of Text and Language of the Senses’.
Teaching
Narrative and Narratology (Level 1)
Writing and Ecology (Level 2)
Writing and Text (Level 2)
Modernism (Level 3 & 4)
Contemporary British Literature (Level 3 & 4)
Twentieth-Century American Literature (Level 3 & 4)
MLitt Modernities (Postgraduate Taught Degree)
Additional information
Andrew is completing final checks of Women Writers of the Second World War: Country House Fiction from Bowen to Compton-Burnett (2025) for Liverpool University Press. This book argues that the country house is one of the crucial sites in anglophone fiction published just before and after World War II. Each of my chapters converges on a different author – Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Barbara Comyns – to explore how their novels represent species of spaces and class hierarchies in the ancestral mansion or the Anglo-Irish ‘big house’. All four novelists treat the country house as a ‘laboratory’ in which to probe governing systems, family tyrannies, subterfuge and secrets – what Bowen termed those dense ‘thickets of mystery between person and person’ – at precisely that historical moment when the National Trust sought to convert surviving aristocratic manors into ‘heritage’ venues open to the public.