Contemporary Research Group
Asking critical questions about how the contemporary is experienced, theorised, produced and contested across contemporary culture.
The group meets around five times a year, to hear new research from external speakers, staff, and postgraduates, and to participate in reading groups addressing key topics in and approaches to the contemporary.
Loughborough English is a centre of excellence for research in contemporary literature and culture. The Contemporary Research Group houses research in late twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, theatre, film, TV, popular culture, and theory. As well as contemporary British literature, we have strengths in American literature and film and African American culture, life writing, feminist theory, age studies, neo-Victorianism, literary prize culture, utopian and dystopian writing, climate fiction, and animal studies.
The Contemporary Research Group comprises academics, creative writers, doctoral researchers, and PGT students from our MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture and MA in Creative Writing and the Writing Industries programmes. We ask critical questions about how the contemporary is experienced, theorised, produced, and contested across contemporary culture. The group organises conferences and symposia, hosts visiting speakers and public lectures, and runs reading groups, workshops, and other events.
Our members are leaders in the field of contemporary literature and culture. Siân Adiseshiah is Editor-in-Chief of the Open Library of Humanities journal C21 Literature and Editor of new Liverpool University Press book series Playwriting and the Contemporary: Critical Collaborations. Jennifer Cooke is Editor of the new Elements in Feminism and Contemporary Critical Theory series for Cambridge University Press.
Our members were amongst a group that co-founded the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), serving on its Executive Committee from 2016-2019, and that inaugurated the ‘What Happens Now’ conference series at the University of Lincoln in 2010, which was hosted at Loughborough in 2018, after the conference series was adopted by BACLS.
Within our group there are creative writing specialists, with a focus on poetry, non-fictional narrative, historical fiction, and young adult literature. Jennifer Cooke writes experimental poetry, Sara Read has published two novels informed by seventeenth-century midwifery practices, Barbara Cooke produces life-writing with an emphasis on book history and place, and Kerry Featherstone writes poetry in English and French.
We host a series of events throughout the year of author talks, readings, and industry specialists in publishing. Each year, as part of the MA, our students organise a small literary festival. Previous authors have included Anne Enright, Helen Calcutt, Lottie Hazell, and Laura Cumming.
If you would like to contact us, please email our current leads Brian Jarvis B.Jarvis@lboro.ac.uk and Paul Jenner P.A.Jenner@lboro.ac.uk
Members are engaged in individual and collective research projects, which include:
Performing Old Age in the Contemporary
Siân Adiseshiah's current projects on older age, the contemporary, and performance develop from her convenorship of the British Academy conference ‘Narratives of Old Age and Gender’, which resulted in a special issue, 'Narratives of Old Age and Gender: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives', Journal of the British Academy 11.S2 (2023). Within this she has an article, 'Old Age, Gender and Constructions of the Contemporary', where she theorises the contemporary as a discursive formation with ageist and gendered exclusions, and analyses the performance of old age in contemporary culture, with particular attention to contemporary theatre and film. She is now developing two projects, a book expanding this theorisation to look more expansively at cultural conceptions of older age, performance, and the contemporary, and a collaborative multi-disciplinary project on age, ageism, and intergenerational encounters.
Help: Gender, Care and Outsourcing in Contemporary Literature
Throughout our lives other people help us give birth, look after our children, clean our workplaces or houses, and attend to us when we are ill, ageing, and dying. Jennifer Cooke has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to examine how contemporary literature gives voice and narrative agency to the experiences of undervalued workers to whom we outsource care and domestic labour.
The research focuses upon the representation of five figures who can be hired to help, from the beginnings of life until its end: the surrogate, nanny, cleaner, nurse, and the carer. Care is a pressing societal concern with transnational implications, since many care roles are undertaken by migrant workers. This project offers timely arguments for revaluing outsourced care and domestic labour and for contemporary literature’s powerful attention to those workers upon whom we rely. It builds upon earlier work of Jennifer’s, published in her co-edited collection, Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies. The result will be her third monograph.
Don DeLillo and the Visual
Brian Jarvis is currently completing a book on the contemporary US author Don DeLillo. Over the course of a career which spans seven decades, DeLillo has established a reputation as one of the most prolific (eighteen novels to date) and significant contemporary writers. DeLillo’s canonical status is underscored by the distinction of his being one of a select cohort of artists whose name has become an adjective. DeLilloesque refers not just to a distinctive style of writing, but to an ensemble of themes which crystallise the contemporary: finance capital and consumerism; violence and viral media; terror, technology and environmental disaster; conspiracy theory and paranoia against a backdrop of apocalyptic dread. Brian’s book considers these and other issues in relation to DeLillo’s abiding fascination with the visual. Including chapters on colour, screens, film, television, computers, photography and painting, Don DeLillo and the Visual will be published by Routledge Press in 2025.
Stardom in Contemporary Global Hollywood
From its beginnings in the first decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood has been a global cinema, mindful of international markets for its films and not shy about drawing on locations worldwide for both its creative talent and its technical expertise. The accelerations and intensifications characteristic of contemporary globalisation, however, mean that to a greater extent than ever before Hollywood is now incorporated in the world system. In this book project, drawing upon political economy, cultural geography and film studies, Andrew Dix aims to explore how these recent global developments have modified Hollywood stardom.
Andrew's book is expansive in its own geographical itinerary, discussing how contemporary Hollywood stardom plays out across three locations: the American hemisphere, the Pacific Rim and the transatlantic region. Case studies include both stars born outside the United States and US stars who, in various ways, could be said to travel cinematically. Among those considered are Benicio del Toro, Tommy Lee Jones, Saoirse Ronan and Michelle Yeoh.
Recent publications on the contemporary from members of the group include:
- Jennifer Cooke, Contemporary Feminist Life-writing: the New Audacity (Cambridge, 2020), The New Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge, 2020);
- Andrew Dix (co-editor), Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter: African American History and Representation (Routledge, 2020)
- Siân Adiseshiah (co-editor), Twenty-first Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2013), Twenty-First Century Drama (Palgrave, 2016), debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2020).
- Claire O’Callaghan, Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics (Bloomsbury, 2017), (co-editor), Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms (Palgrave, 2016), (co-editor) Gender and Austerity in Contemporary Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television (I.B. Taurus, 2016).
The group meets around five times a year, to hear new research from external speakers, staff, and postgraduates, and to participate in reading groups addressing key topics in and approaches to the contemporary.
Recent events include:
Dr Alice Bennett (Liverpool Hope University), 'Artful Sweetness: Ali Smith and Twee Aesthetics' (2024)
Contemporary Creative: Loughborough Doctoral Researcher Showcase with Megan Constable and Rae Powell (2022)
Dr Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (Queen Mary), 'Performance and Service Work' (2022)
Dr Brian Jarvis (Loughborough), 'Don DeLillo in Colour'' (2021)