School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

I joined the University of Portsmouth in autumn 2009, after previously working for seven years as lecturer in English and European Literature at the University of Derby. My special field is National Identity, and here in particular the question of 'Englishness'. I teach, as part of my own research specialism, a second-year unit on National Identities / Englishness and a third-year option dedicated to Holocaust Literatures, and am happy to consider post-graduate projects dealing with national identity construction, spatial theories, and Holocaust writing.

I have published extensively on Englishness and its representations in works by authors as diverse as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, George Orwell, Julian Barnes, Siegfried Sassoon and W.G. Sebald. My monograph The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia was published by Ashgate in late 2007. I have since then been at work on several book chapters on Travel Writing, servitude, Harry Potter, and James Bond, but have also started research into my next monograph project which aims to dissect literary representations of British fascism across the twentieth century.

I am currently editing two books: one with a colleague from the Politics Department at the University of Ulster, Arthur Aughey, entitled These Englands. Contemporary Conversations on National Identity which is under contract with Manchester University Press and will be published in 2011; the second with two former colleagues from the University of Derby's American Studies and History Divisions respectively, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson, which is entitled Land & Identity and will be published by Rodopi Press.

As a second field of interest, I have done considerable work on memory cultures, trauma, and second-generation Holocaust writing which I am currently developing into an article-length study.

Publications

Monographs:

• The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness & Nostalgia  (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Edited Collections:

• Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012)
• With Arthur Aughey. These Englands. Contemporary Conversations on Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)

Journals:

• ‘We Shall Be Punished’: Positionality and Post-Memory in the Work of Rachel Seiffert and Uwe Timm”, in Jenni Adams & Sue Vice (eds.), Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (Edgware, Middlesex: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), pp. 231—50 
• Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson, 'Introduction: Framing and Reframing Land and Identity' in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 17--39
• Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell, 'Afterword: Lines of Flight: Unframing Land, Unframing Identity -- Two Speculations' in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 283--304
• “Putting England Back on Top? Ian Fleming, James Bond, and the Question of England”, Yearbook of English Studies 42 (2012): 13--29
• “’We Shall Be Punished’: Positionality and Postmemory in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow”, Holocaust Studies 17.2-3 (autumn/winter, 2011): 261--82
• “A Peculiarly English Idiosyncrasy? Julian Barnes’s Use of Lists in England England,” ABC. American, British and Canadian Studies 13 (Dec 2009): 75—87.
• “England? Whose England?: (Re)Constructing England in Julian Barnes’ England England and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn,” National Identities 10.2 (2008): 167—84.
• “‘Two Lost Souls’: An Extended Comparison of Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Powell’s Charles Stringham,” Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society 2 (2007): 37—50.
• “‘A Question of Upbringing’: The Public School and the Education of the English Gentleman,” Anglo-Saxonica 23 (2005): 187—203.

Review Essays:

• “The Continued Presence of the Past: New Directions in Holocaust Writing?” Modernism / Modernity 13.3 (September 2006): 567—76 .

Peer-Reviewed Book Contributions:

• Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson, 'Introduction: Framing and Reframing Land and Identity' in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 17--39
• Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell, 'Afterword: Lines of Flight: Unframing Land, Unframing Identity -- Two Speculations' in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 283--304
• With Arthur Aughey, “Englishness as Conversation: an Introduction,” in Aughey & Berberich (eds.). These Englands: A Conversation on National Identity (Manchester: MUP, 2011), 1—26.
• With Arthur Aughey, “Afterword”, in Aughey & Berberich (eds.). These Englands: A Conversation on National Identity (Manchester: MUP, 2011), 274—9.
• “At Her Majesty’s Service: Bond, Englishness and the Subversion of the Gentleman Ideal”, in Joachim Frenck & Christian Krug (eds.), The Cultures of James Bond (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier,2011), 105-14
• “Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: Working through England’s Traumatic Past as a Critique of Thatcherism”, in Sebastian Groes & Barry Lewis (eds.), Kazuo Ishiguro. New Critical Visions of the Novels (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 118-30
• “‘All Letters Quoted are Authentic’: The Past after Postmodern Fabulation in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George”, in Sebastian Groes & Peter Childs (eds.), Julian Barnes. Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2011), 117-28.
• “Harry Potter and the Idea of the Gentleman as Hero”, in Katrin Berndt & Lena Steveker (eds), Heroism in the Harry Potter Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 141—57.
• “Writing England, Finding the Self: Jonathan Raban and the Travelogue as Identity Tool”, in Adeline Johns-Putra & Catherine Brace (eds.), Processes: Landscape and Text (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 267—83.
• “‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’ World War I and the Uses of the Pastoral Tradition”, in Petra Rau (ed.), Bodies-at-War: Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 26—45.
• “From Glory to Wasteland: Rediscovering the Country House in Twentieth-Century Literature”, in Stephen Barfield, Philip Tew & David James (eds), New Version of Pastoral (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 44—57.
• “Whose Englishness is it anyway? James’ Hawes’ post-modern England(s),” in Floriane Reviron-Piégay (ed.), Englishness Revisited (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 389—400.
• “‘This Green and Pleasant Land’: Cultural Constructions of Englishness,” in Robert Burden & Stephan Kohl (eds.), Landscape and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 207—224.
• “A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier,” in Dennis Brown & Jennifer Plastow (eds.), Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 195—209.
• “‘Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood’: Orwell, Landscape and Englishness” in Annette Gomis & Susana Onega (eds.), George Orwell. A Centenary Celebration (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2005), 173—86.
• “Introduction: Anthony Powell in 2,500 Words” in Christine Berberich (ed.), Writing on Anthony Powell (Greenford: Anthony Powell Society, 2005)
• “‘All Gentlemen are now very old’: Waugh, Nostalgia and the Image of the English Gentleman” in Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis (eds.), Waugh Without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 45—57.
• “‘I was meditating about England’: The Importance of Rural England for the Construction of ‘Englishness’” in Robert Phillips & Helen Brocklehurst (eds), History, Nationhood & the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 375—85.
• “A Revolutionary in Love with the 1900s: Orwell in Defence of Old England,” in A. Lázaro (ed.), The Road from George Orwell. His Achievement & Legacy (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 33— 52.

On-line Journals / Websites

• I am one of the editors and contribute to the website http://www.whatenglandmeanstome.co.uk, a 'Domesday book of Englishness'.