Professor Peter Childs
Leading the University's Research Office, Peter Childs is Dean of Research and Professor of Modern English Literature. Peter has overall responsibility for research developments supporting staff and students across the University and oversees the Postgraduate Research Centre, led by Dr Ros Jennings, the Research Office (Dr Debra Marshall – Research Development) and the University's Research Development Group.
In terms of his own research, Peter specialises in literature since 1900 and has published numerous essays and articles on authors such as Paul Scott, Ian McEwan, E. M. Forster and Hanif Kureishi. He has additionally edited or written over a dozen books on diverse subjects ranging from contemporary British culture to post-colonial theory. Peter's published works include: Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, The Twentieth Century in Poetry, Modernism: the New Critical Idiom, Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, and Reading Fiction: Opening the Text. Recent books include Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 for Palgrave Macmillan, Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches for Edinburgh University Press, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, and Modernism and the Post-Colonial for Continuum. He has published most recently on Ian McEwan and contemporary British heritage fiction, and is currently researching a monograph on Julian Barnes for Manchester University Press. Peter was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2004 and elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2005.