The Americanists
One of the first London universities to offer a dedicated pathway in the Literature and Culture of the United States, the American research cluster at Goldsmiths offers a vital contribution to the disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields that are currently shaping the understanding of American literature and culture.
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Offering an extensive and varied understanding of American literature, our collective research focuses on a number of significant and growing fields, including visual culture, eco-criticism, hemispheric American Studies, group biography and aesthetic resistance in contemporary indigenous literature and art.
Our research explores many of the key topics that shaped American literature and culture during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By engaging with a broad set of interests our work shows that current understandings of literary convention and traditional form can be enriched—and challenged—through the consideration of material objects, oral traditions, performance art and inventive literary and artistic practices.
We take great pride in the fact that our pioneering research reflects our mission to embrace the more complex perceptions of American literature, society and history that exist today.
Our writing is informed by this principle, and we are deeply committed to the process of establishing dynamic pedagogical approaches that both reveal and enable more diverse means of understanding U.S. literature and culture. Our research is greatly informed by our teaching, and our teaching serves as a constant reminder of the interests and issues that are most pressing in today’s world.
Dr Padraig Kirwan
Dr Padraig Kirwan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture and specializes in contemporary Native American literature. Although his primary research interest is the tribal literatures of the Americas, he is also interested in Irish fiction, Transatlantic Studies, Border Studies and fictional engagements with extra-textual questions surrounding sovereignty.
Dr Rick Crownshaw
Dr Rick Crownshaw is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, where he teaches mainly American literature. Rick received his BA from Keele University and his MA and DPhil from the University of Sussex. Before Goldsmiths, Rick taught at Keele and then Manchester Metropolitan University. Rick’s research has mostly focused on American literature and culture but often within transnational and even planetary contexts.
Dr Caroline Blinder
Dr Caroline Blinder is Reader in American Literature and Culture with a specialization in the intersections between literature and visual culture, in particular 20th century American writing and Documentary photography. Her first book was A Self-made Surrealist - Ideology and Aesthetics in the work of Henry Miller (Camden House 2000). She has published extensively on photo-textual intersections and is the editor of New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 2010.