Professor Alex Goody

Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture

School of Education, Humanities and Languages

Alex Goody

Role

I studied for my BA at the University of York and for my MA at the University of Leeds. My PhD on 'Mina Loy’s Modernist Aesthetic’ was awarded at the University of Leeds. My teaching career has taken me from Leeds, to Falmouth University in Cornwall, before arriving at Oxford Brookes University. I teach primarily on modern and contemporary literature, media and culture, and American literature and culture. From 2014-2020 I was on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies. I am currently the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead (Academic) for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Teaching and supervision

Courses

Modules taught

Undergraduate

  • American Vistas
  • Cultures of Modernity
  • Posthuman Futures
  • Women and Modernism
  • Video Games, Digital Texts and Interactive Narratives
  • Critical Theory in Action

Postgraduate

  • Queer Cities

Supervision

I am interested in supervising projects in modernist literature and culture, literature and technology, women’s writing, contemporary media and digital texts, and speculative and science fiction and futurisms. I have previously supervised PhDs on modernism and dance, diasporic modern poetry, Hart Crane, space and subjectivity in 1950s American Literature, modern and contemporary American Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, technology and contemporary American Fiction, masculinity and contemporary culture, and Arab women's writing.

Research Students

Name Thesis title Completed
Russell Anderson Hypertextual Performance: developing audience-controlled narratives in theatre Active
Susan Campbell Gertrude Stein, spatial form and contemporary prose poetry Active
Sarah Gilbert Women’s anti-Vietnam war poetry and canon(s): critical and feminist representation of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Levertov Active
Jennifer Wong A transnational poetics of place: identity, otherness and the meaning of home in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Bei Dao, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe 2018

Research

I work in the field of modernist studies, technology and literature, contemporary media and on American literature and culture. I have published books and articles on Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, American Modernism, New York Dada, technology and literature, jewish writing, contemporary poetry, modernist drama, dance, radio, Westworld, modernist animal studies and ecocriticism.

Research Interests

  • Modernist Studies
  • Technology, Culture, Contemporary Media
  • Video Games & Interactive Narratives
  • Women’s Writing
  • Animal Studies
  • Posthumanisms & alternative futurisms
  • Alternative futurisms
  • Modern and Contemporary Poetry
  • WWII Radio Drama and Features
  • Gender and sexuality

Research projects

  • Djuna Barnes’s New York. Digitising and creating a fully-searchable, open access, online repository and a digital edition of all of Barnes's journalism published between 1913 and 1922.
  • Mina Loy Play Group: An international cross-institutional collaboration to study, stage and stimulate interdisciplinary conversation about Loy's Futurist poetic dramas. The project explores how technologies of performance intersect with modernist and futurist ideas of technology and, in staging Loy's plays, will facilitate experiencing them from a posthuman perspective. 
  • ‘UN/REAL: exploring the work of Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro to understand shifting perceptions of reality in the age of Virtual Reality.’ A team of Anglo-Japanese scholars, designers, writers and artists exploring the context of virtual technologies, digital wellbeing, social cohesion and shifting perceptions of reality in Japan and the UK.
  • Beastly Modernisms: Figures of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture. A collection of discipline defining essays on modernist animal studies, co-edited with Saskia McCracken; forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in March 2023

Research Funding

  • £9245 British Academy Small Research Grant (for ‘Djuna Barnes’s New York’ project) (2022)
  • ​​$500 Modernist Studies Association Travel Award (2019)
  • £2,550 British Academy Small Research Grant (for ‘Staging The Antiphon’ project) (2012)
  • £250: British Association for American Studies conference grant (2006)
  • £900: US Embassy grant (2006)
  • British Academy PhD Scholarship (1994-1997)

I am also part of:

Centres and institutes

Groups

Projects

Publications

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Further details

Public Engagement

  • Oxford Science Together ‘Epochs’ Project- collaboration with Rawz (Inner Peace Records), Dr. Stephanie Longet (Oxford) and Professor David De Roure (Oxford) (October 2021-November 2022)
  • ‘Epochs Project’ Talk, Science Together, Oxford Museum of Natural History, June 2022
  • ‘Myth-busting AI’ Talk, Think Human Festival, Oxford Brookes University (April 2022)
  • ‘Tangible Utopias Roundtable’, Town Hall Meeting of the Air Exhibition, BALTIC Newcastle (July 2021)
  •  ‘Artificial Futures Workshop’, Think Human Festival, Oxford Brookes University (February 2020)
  • Public Lecture ‘Dr Frankenstein and the Sex Robots’, Oxford Brookes University (October 2018)
  • ‘Anna Christie Film Screening and Talk’, American Cool, Ashmolean Museum Oxford (May 2018)
  • ‘Technology, Technicity and the Feminist Avant-Garde’ Talk The Power of the Avant-Garde Exhibition BOZAR, Brussels (November 2016)