Dr Carol Watts
on leave October 2007 to December 2008
Carol Watts specialises in eighteenth-century and contemporary literature and culture, and teaches, writes and supervises across this range, including work on US literature, film and poetics. Published work includes Dorothy Richardson (Writers and their Work, 1995) and most recently The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh/Toronto, 2007), which examines the impact of Britain’s first global war for empire on the culture and politics of the mid-eighteenth-century, through the writing of Laurence Sterne. Her research in this field is continuing with a Leverhulme funded project on the culture of loyalist refugees in America during and following the revolutionary wars, thinking in the same instance about the use of the term refugee in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Research also includes an ongoing critical engagement with film, and contemporary poetry, currently exploring the connections between poetry and mathematical landscapes for a writing project called Zeta Landscape.
Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature (2002-4, 2006-7), and co-Director with William Rowe of the Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, she is interested in extending the possibilities for research and writing in the contemporary period, including developing collaborations with other London institutions, most recently working on the Wigmore Hall song project, which brought together Birkbeck postgraduate writers with composing students from the Guildhall School of Music. She is a poet, and recently published a collection, Wrack (Reality Street Editions, 2007), a chapbook, brass, running (Equipage, 2006), and an eBook of prose poem chronicles, alphabetise, first exhibited at the Text Festival in Bury Museum of Art, Manchester, in 2005. She has been invited to read her poetry in Britain and the US, including at the Poetry Center in San Francisco and the Runnymede Festival.
Carol has been the Academic Director of Birkbeck’s London Semester Programme for US students since 1994.
Teaching
BA: US Literature 1776-1900; Contemporary US Fiction; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; The Idle Spectator: Travel and Tourism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
MA Modern and Contemporary Literature: Core Course 2: Post-War to Contemporary; Text into Film/Film as Text: Towards a Concept of Adaptation; Contemporary US Fiction; Encounters with the Real: Currents in Contemporary Writing
Selected Publications
Books
The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
Dorothy Richardson (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995)
Chapters in Books
‘Sterne’s Politicks, Ireland and the Nature of Evil-Speaking’, in Thomas Keymer, ed., Cambridge Companion to Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2008)
‘”The Mind Has Fuses”: Detonating B.S. Johnson’, in Philip Tew and Glyn White, eds, Re-reading B.S. Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
‘On Conversation’, in David Seed, ed., Literature and the Visual Media: Essays and Studies 2005 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp.142-62
‘A Rarie-Shew System of Architecture: Bath and the Cultural Scenography of Palladianism’ in Elizabeth McKellar and Barbara Arciszewska, eds, Reconstructing British Classicism: New Approaches in Eighteenth-Century Architecture (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp.119-141
‘Beyond Interpellation? Affect and Embodiment in the Poetics of Denise Riley’, in Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, eds, Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/ Writing/Practice (London: Macmillan, 2000)
‘Back to the Future: Revisiting Kristeva’s “Women’s Time”’ in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Mark, eds, Literature and the Contemporary (London: Longman, 1999), pp.156-78.
Articles
‘A Comedy of Terrors: Candide and the Jus Publicum Europaeum’, South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue on Carl Schmitt 104.2 (2005), 337-47.
‘The Common Reader and Other Myths’, Guardian Review, 24 July 2004, p.7.
‘Thinking about the X Factor, or, What’s the Cultural History of Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History 1(2004), 217-224.
‘Funny, Peculiar: Re-reading Tristram Shandy’, Guardian Review, 23 August 2003, pp. 28-9
‘Adapting Affect: The Melodramatic Economy of Broken Blossoms’, Film Studies: An International Review 3 (2002), 31-46.
‘Unworkable Feeling: Diana, Death and Feminisation’, New Formations 36 (1999), 32-43.
‘Time and the Working Mother: Kristeva’s “Women’s Time” Revisited’, Radical Philosophy 91 (1998), 6-17.
‘Mike Leigh’s Naked and the Gestic Economy of Cinema’, Women: A Cultural Review 7:3(1996), 271-8.
Poetic Work
Wrack (Hastings: Reality Street Editions, 2007)
brass, running, chapbook (Cambridge: Equipage, 2006); anthologised in Jeff Hilson, ed., The Contemporary Free Verse Sonnet (Hastings: Reality Street, forthcoming 2007)
alphabetise, prose poem chronicle, exhibited in Different Alphabets, Bury Museum of Art, 17 September – 27 November 2005
a - h online at www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/4/carol.html
as eBook (Intercapillary Editions, 2005) free download from http://www.lulu.com/content/894954
‘Calculations’, ‘Of Surviving Material’, and ‘Arriving’, poems from work-in-progress Dogtown, published on http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/10/from-dogtown.html
'Hare', in Dusie, Issue Six, at http://www.dusie.org/watts.html
from 'Occasionals', Signals Magazine Issue Four, at http://www.signalsmagazine.co.uk/4/index.htm
from Zeta Landscape, How2 3:2 (2007), http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/watts.html