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.
Recent activities:
Collaborative and individual events and affiliations past and present reflect the group’s ongoing interest in the contemporary:
- Meet the Author: Anne Enright (Loughborough, 2019) and Anne Enright: In Conversation at Loughborough University (Loughborough, 2019) events as part of the Big Booker Read at Loughborough in partnership with the Booker Prize Foundation.
- Author readings and events: Elizabeth Jenner and The Magic Places; An Evening with Kate Summerscale (May 2019).
- Loughborough’s hosting of the ‘What Happens Now’ international conference of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), July 2018
- ‘Violence and the American Imagination’ International Interdisciplinary conference, Loughborough, 2015, leading to the edited collection Dix and Templeton, Violence from Slavery to Black Lives Matter (Routledge, 2019).
- The Overton Poetry Prize comprising an annual competition for the publication of a sequence of poems of up to 100 lines on any subject.
- Organisational involvements of group members include: British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (Siân Adiseshiah and Jennifer Cooke, executive committee roles); Contemporary Playwriting Network (Siân Adiseshiah, founding member); Contemporary Women’s Writing Association (Claire O’Callaghan).
Recent publications:
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).
