An aerial view of Singleton Campus and the bay opposite
Dr Richard Robinson

Dr Richard Robinson

Associate Professor, English Literature

Telephone number

+44 (0) 1792 602796

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Office - 210
Second Floor
Keir Hardie Building
Singleton Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Dr Richard Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Media and Language, where he is founding co-director of the Creative and Critical Practice Research Group (CCPRG). His main areas of expertise are twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, particularly modernism, late modernism, Irish writing and the study of European literary borderlands. He is the author of two monographs: Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007) and John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017). He publishes in journals such as Critical Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Irish University Review, Journal of European Studies, Textual Practice and English Studies. He is a book reviewer for The Guardian.

Richard is currently working on style and contemporary fiction. He co-edited (with Barry Sheils) a special issue of Textual Practice, The Contemporary Problem of Style (2022). He is co-authoring (with Barry Sheils) a monograph entitled The Discipline of Style: Sentence, Voice, Description and Translation in Contemporary Fiction.

Areas Of Expertise

  • Modernist and Contemporary Writing in English, including Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Irish Studies, including James Joyce and John McGahern
  • Border studies, with a particular interest in representations of Central Europe
  • The disciplinary history of style

Career Highlights

Teaching Interests

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).

Research