Staff Profile
Dr Edward Clough
Lecturer in American Modern Literature
I joined the School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics in 2021 as a Lecturer in American Modernist Literature. I have previously taught at the University of Manchester and at the University of East Anglia, where I obtained my PhD in American Literature in 2014. I am currently Reviews Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Comparative American Studies.
I am particularly interested in the relationships between power and race in modern literature and culture. In my research and teaching I specialise in literature of the modernist period, representations of the legacies of slavery and the plantation, and the literature and culture of the US South in general. Beyond modern literature, I also have a strong interest in visual culture (especially film) and contemporary music.
I am currently in the process of completing a monograph – Post-plantation Traces: The Afterlives of the Plantation in Southern Detective and Crime Fiction – that examines the relationship between the detective and crime fiction genres and the legacies of the plantation in US southern literature. The project looks at works by William Faulkner, Ernest J. Gaines, James Lee Burke, Donna Tartt, and Attica Locke and explores questions of disclosure, control, and agency in literary and social terms. I am also working on a parallel article exploring the connections between crime fiction, the penitentiary, and the plantation in Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.
My PhD thesis, Building Yoknapatawpha: Reading Space and the Plantation in William Faulkner", explored the relationship between theories of space, literary form, and plantation history as represented within Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha cycle. I have published articles on aspects of Faulkner’s work – specifically his treatments of lynching and yellow fever – and on the literature of Charles Chesnutt and Donna Tartt. My articles and reviews have been published in Mississippi Quarterly,Southern Quarterly, Faulkner Journal, Comparative American Studies and Journal of American Studies.
In 2021, I edited a special issue of Comparative American Studies on "Cultures of Protest in American Music", to which I also contributed an article examining the relationship between African American spirituals, Scandinavian black metal, and ideas of cultural appropriation and resistance in the music of Zeal & Ardor.
Teaching for 2021-22:
- Introduction to Literary Studies 1 (Stage 1 - Contributing Lecturer)
- Modernisms (Stage 2 - Contributing Lecture and Seminar Leader)
- American Modernist Literature (Stage 3 - Module Leader)
- Radicalisms (MA - Module Leader)
- Independent Research Project (Stage 2)
- Dissertation (Stage 3)
- Clough E. "Devil is Fine, Devil is Kind: Slave Spirituals, Satanic Black Metal, and Cultural Appropriation in the Music of Zeal & Ardor". Comparative American Studies 2021, 18(2). In Preparation.
- Clough E. Detecting the South in Fiction, Film & Television. Comparative American Studies 2020, 17(3-4), 407-409.
- Clough E. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity. Comparative American Studies 2020, 17(3-4), 405-407.
- Clough E. Dying of the Stranger's Disease: Yellow Fever, Narrative Space, and the Art of Exclusion in Absalom, Absalom!. The Faulkner Journal 2019, 31(1), 89-111.
- Clough E. In Search of Sunken Graves: Between Postslavery and Plantation in Charles Chesnutt's Fiction. Southern Quarterly 2015, 53(1), 87-104.
- Clough E. Poisonous Possibilities: Telling Stories and Telling Ruins in Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. Mississippi Quarterly 2015, 68(3-4), 319-340.
- Clough E. "Violence and the Hearth: Lynching and Resistance in Go Down, Moses". Mississippi Quarterly 2012, 65(3), 391-412.