Dr Deborah Bowman

  • College positions:
    Fellow and College Lecturer in English
    Postgraduate Tutor
    Director of Studies
  • Subjects: English

I teach across nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century English and American literature, with a particular emphasis on modernist writing. I’ve published on William Empson, the Movement poets, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, and the experience of reading, and am currently editing Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and writing a book on modernism, pattern and scale. Other areas of interest for me include: critical experiment, literary and architectural form, improvisation in reading, writing and dance, and interactions between fiction and non-fiction. I currently teach classes on the practical criticism of prose and poetry and run our first year workshops on Critical Writing. I also teach optional third year courses on Literature and Visual Culture, Modernism and the Short Story, and Contemporary writing, and have recently supervised dissertations on translation and fragments, John Cage, Samuel Beckett, W.S. Graham, the modern lyric essay and Emily Dickinson, among others.