Andrew Dix studied at the University of Cambridge, completing a BA in English and a PhD on the fiction of postmodern US novelists William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. Before his appointment at Loughborough in 2005, he taught English and American literature at the University of Warwick, Nottingham Trent University, and for the Workers’ Educational Association in Derbyshire.
Through his research, teaching and outreach activities, Andrew aims to promote the intellectual excitement and the social value of engaging with American literature, film and popular culture. He is committed to reaching audiences beyond as well as within the university world, for example by writing for The Conversation blogging site.
Andrew is also an active member of Loughborough UCU, serving on the union’s branch committee and undertaking casework in support of colleagues across the institution who are facing difficult or stressful situations.
Andrew has published extensively on topics in American literary and film studies, ranging historically from Mark Twain’s Mississippi writings in the late nineteenth century to Johnny Depp’s stardom in the present. But while these subjects differ significantly in period and genre, Andrew aims to bring to each of them core questions about the politics of cultural forms.
In his research, as well as in his teaching, Andrew is invested in African American culture from the post-Civil War period to the current moment of Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName. With his colleague (and former doctoral researcher) Peter Templeton, he recently edited a collection of essays, Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter: African American History and Representation (Routledge). Andrew’s own chapter in the volume explores the political implications of violence in Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation films of the 1970s.
Currently, Andrew is working on two book projects, both for Routledge. The first is a study of contemporary Hollywood stardom and globalisation, with the book’s case studies to include Hugh Jackman and Michelle Yeoh, as well as Depp. The second, again with Peter Templeton as collaborator, is a new and updated edition of Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean’s highly successful American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture.
Andrew’s teaching is principally in American literature and film, including a first-year module in African American culture from slave narrative to hip-hop and a third-year module which brings a global perspective to bear on contemporary US fiction and film. Outside English, Andrew teaches a third-year module taken by History, Politics and International Relations students in the cultural history of the United States from the ending of the Civil War to the outbreak of World War Two.
Reflecting his broader academic interests, Andrew also contributes to modules in English literature, including teaching on the core first-year module on narrative.
Topics studied by Andrew’s current and recent doctoral researchers include:
- Staging Black Female Voices: Dramatisations of Silence, Anger and Desire in Contemporary African American and Black British Theatre
- Violence and Native Americans in Nineteenth-Century US Literature
- Contemporary Anglophone Muslim Fiction
- 9/11 in American and British Fiction
- The Poetics and Politics of Liminality: New Transcendentalism in Contemporary American Women’s Writing
- Jefferson and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Southern Pastoral
- Animated Personalities: Reading Stardom in American Theatrical Short Cartoons (2012)
- ‘Animation, Adaptation, and the Plague’, co-authored with Sara Read, Adaptation, 16, 3 (2023), 406-426
- ‘“Old,” “New,” and “Problem” Souths: Historical Change and Ideological Instability in Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia’, co-authored with Peter Templeton, Mississippi Quarterly, 74, 3 (2022), 313-333
- American Studies (Routledge, 2021)
- Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter: African American History and Representation, co-edited with Peter Templeton (Routledge, 2020)
- ‘“The Baddest One-Chick Hit Squad”: Pam Grier, Angela Davis and the Politics of Female Violence in Blaxploitation Cinema’, in Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter, 141-157
- Beginning Film Studies, 2nd (Manchester University Press, 2016)
- ‘Johnny Depp in Exile’, Comparative American Studies, 12, 3 (2014), 218-230