School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

Dr Bran Nicol's research interests are in post-war British and American fiction, crime fiction and film, cultural studies, and critical and cultural theory, especially postmodernism and psychoanalysis. His work on fiction includes monographs on the novelists Iris Murdoch and DM Thomas, and a study of the major US and British writers to have been associated with postmodernism, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009). He is also increasingly interested in ‘crime culture’, the way that crime in literature and cinema reflects and shapes cultural anxieties and desires. This is the subject Stalking, which appeared in 2006 and led to his being shortlisted for the 2007 Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year award. It has been translated into Italian and Korean, and a Japanese edition will appear in 2011.

Bran is currently writing a selective cultural history of the private eye in cinema for Reaktion Books, and co-editing a collection of essays on ‘crime culture’ for Continuum with Dr Patricia Pulham of the CSL and Dr Eugene McNulty of St Patrick’s College, Dublin. He is also working on two new projects: one on the figure of the stranger in modern culture, the other on the ‘seductions of crime fiction’, which, among other things, will explore crime-fiction motifs in the work of authors who are not ‘crime writers’ in a generic sense (e.g. Borges, Beckett, Spark, etc.).

He is a member of the Committee for the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, the AHRC Peer Review College, and is on the editorial boards for S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique and The Iris Murdoch Review. He has written articles for The Times Higher Education Supplement and American Sexualities Magazine (http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/mad_about_you) and appeared on radio programmes discussing stalking culture.

Qualifications
MA in English & Contemporary European Studies (University of Dundee) (1st class)
PhD in English Literature (Lancaster University)

• The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Stalking (Reaktion Books, 2006).
• D. M. Thomas (Writers and their Work series, British Council/Northcote House, 2004).
• Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction 2nd Edition. (Palgrave, 2004).
• Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)

Current research
Bran is currently working on a monograph entitled Private Eye: Detectives in the Cinema (Reaktion Books) and planning a book on ‘metaphysical’ detective fiction.

Full research profile: Bran Nicol.