Professor Suzanne Hobson, BA (Oxford) MA (Warwick) PhD (London)

Profile

I grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire where I attended a comprehensive school before studying for my BA at Hertford College, University of Oxford. I moved to the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick for my MA and to the English Department at Queen Mary University of London for my PhD. I have been teaching at Queen Mary since 2007.

Undergraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH102: Reading Theory and Interpretation
• ESH213: Modernism
• ESH393: Feminism(s)
• ESH381: DH Lawrence: Controversy and Legacy

Research

Research Interests:

• Modernist and early-twentieth century literature
• Religion and Secularism
• Literary theory

Recent and On-Going Research

I teach and write on modernism and literary theory and am especially interested in questions of religion and Secularism in the first half of the twentieth century. My latest book, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford University Press 2022), offers a new account of the relationship between literary and Secularist networks in interwar Britain. It explores how authors such as H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, H.D., K.S. Bhat, Vernon Lee and Naomi Mitchison engaged with Secularist thinkers and ideas in their writing. My first book, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), argued that, far from disappearing from modernist literature, angels proliferate as signifiers of modernity and of its discontents.

I recently finished co-editing The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (Edinburgh University Press 2023) which includes 30+ specially commissioned chapters on modernist myth, religion and alternative spiritualities.

I am past chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and co-organiser of the London Modernism Seminar. You can listen to me talking about modernism on BBC Radio 4 ‘Start the Week’ here.

Publications

Selected publications

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, co-edited with Andrew Radford (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in January 2023)

Unbelief in Interwar Literary Cultures: Doubting Moderns (Oxford University Press, 2022)

‘Living Up to Her “Avant-Guardism”: H.D. and the Senescence of Classical Modernism, humanities 8 (2019): 162, DOI10.3390/h8040162. 9500 words.

‘D.H. Lawrence and his Contemporaries.’ In D.H. Lawrence in Context, edited by Andrew Harrison. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 71-80.

‘”Looking all lost towards a Cook's guide for beauty”: The Art of Literature and the Lessons of the Guidebook in Modernist Writing.’ Studies in Travel Writing 19 (2015): 30-47.

‘Religion and Spirituality.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, edited by Celia Marshik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18-32.

Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, co-edited by Rachel Potter (Salt: Cambridge, 2010)

See also my Queen Mary Research Publications profile

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

Completed projects include:

• Jade French, ‘Why do you go on living?’: The Poetics of Ageing in the Works of Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes’
• Charlotte Whalen, ‘Mina Loy’s Designs for Modernism’
• David Winks, ‘Routes to Perception: Twentieth-Century Domestic Travel Literature and the End of Empire in England’ (co-supervisor)
• Isabelle Parkinson, ‘Whose Gertrude Stein? Contemporary Poetry, Modernist Institutions and Stein’s Troublesome Legacy’

Public Engagement

Guest on ‘Modernism’ Start the Week, BBC Radio 4 (24 January 2022), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013r0k

‘Apocalypse’, Forum for Philosophy, Live event and podcast: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/apocalypse/