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Staff Profile

Dr Mark Byers

Lecturer

Background


I took a BA in English at Durham University before moving on to Balliol College, Oxford, for an MSt in English (1900-Present). I stayed on at Balliol for a DPhil in English, supervised by Professor Sir Jonathan Bate. After a short time as a Research Assistant at Tate, London, I took up a position as Research Associate in Newcastle in 2016, later becoming a Lecturer.

Research

Research Interests

My research concerns 'later' modernisms in British and American poetry and visual art. My first monograph, Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self (OUP 2018), investigated a re-orientation of literary and visual modernism in the latter half of the 1940s, reading the work of US poet Charles Olson alongside abstract expressionism. I have written on several other aspects of late modernist poetry in articles on US 'Language' writing and the work of poets R.F. Langley, Tom Raworth, and, most recently, the English Surrealist Hugh Sykes Davies.

I am shortly to complete The Letters of Tom Raworth, a project supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. This book gathers letters from almost 30 archives and libraries across Britain, the United States, and Europe (as well as numerous private collections), and offers a generous annotated selection of Raworth's correspondence from 1960 to 1995. The volume is contracted with the University of New Mexico Press and due for publication in 2026.

I am in the final stages of another book project, The Lives of the English Surrealists, a group biography of five artists and writers closely associated with the Surrealist movement in England (Eileen Agar, Julian Trevelyan, David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, and Humphrey Jennings). This book draws on a wealth of archival sources to tell the story of Surrealism's arrival in England, its heyday in 1936, and its slow dissolution over the course of the Second World War. The Lives of the English Surrealists is contracted with Bloomsbury Visual Arts and also due for publication in 2026.


Postgraduate Supervision 

I am currently co-supervising five PhD students on topics including Linguistically Innovative Poetry and Thatcherism, Barbara Guest and New York School painting, the poetry of Tom Pickard, modernism and AI, and the East London Group. I particularly welcome inquiries from prospective research students interested in the following areas of research:

  • Late modernist poetry in Britain
  • The New American Poetry
  • English Surrealism
  • Literature of the 1930s
  • British literature and visual art 1939-1945
Teaching

I am on research leave in semester 1 25/26. In semester 2 I am module leader for Early 20th Century American Literature (SEL2240).

Publications