Staff Profile

Background

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in the meeting points between the humanities and social sciences. So far this has constituted research into the social imagination of economics and culture. My work has asked: how do economic and cultural fields shape our understandings of society?

I have written on fiction, film and television and I am preparing essays on water and petro-cultures, reading in video games, and theories of the occupation. I would be happy to talk to anyone who shares any complementary interests.

Teaching has been the cornerstone of my professional practice and I welcome the opportunity to develop innovative teaching practices with other educators, particularly around student-centred learning. I have taught in both disciplinary-specific and inter-disciplinary contexts. My interdisciplinary teaching has included a module of my own design on the riot in fiction, film and political, economic and cultural theory.

Prior to taking up my post in the Combined Honours Centre of Newcastle's School X, I held a three-year Early-Career Teaching and Research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Before that, I held different teaching posts in Newcastle's School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.

Qualifications

PhD in American Literature, 'United States: National Sociality and Global Capital in American Fiction (1975-2010), Newcastle University (2016)

MA in English Literature, The University of Warwick (2010)

BA (Hons) in English Studies (Major) with Film Studies (Minor), Oxford Brookes University (2008)

Current Teaching

Stage Three

HSS 3500/3099, Combined Honours Final Year Project

HSS 3011, Combined Honours Study Abroad Module

Prior Teaching

I have supervised over a hundred dissertations by a range of undergraduate, postgraduate and research students. Whilst the topics have been varied, they have clustered around modern and contemporary literature and film.

Newcastle

SEL 2206, Contemporary Cultures

SEL 2205, Fictions of Migration

SEL 2207, Modernisms

SEL 1023, Transformations

SEL 1003, Introduction to Literary Studies 1

Edinburgh

Final Year & Postgraduate Course, American Carnage: Riot Narratives in the US

Final Year & Postgraduate Course, Fairy Tales

Final Year & Postgraduate Course, Modernism, Myth and Romance

Honours Course, American Innocence

Honours Course, Critical Practice: Criticism

Pre-Honours Course, English Literature 2

Pre-Honours Course, Literary Studies 1A

Research Interests

I am interested in:

• 20th- and 21st-century fiction and film
• Interdisciplinary approaches in teaching and scholarship.
• Critical theory, particularly economic humanities and Marxism. I also have strong interests in postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis.
• Theory of neoliberalism and the role of capitalism and economics in culture.

I would welcome any inquiries from colleagues, students or other interested parties on any of these topics. 

• Articles

  • Kessous S. The sound of finance: noise, music, and pension fund capitalism in William Gaddis's JR. Textual Practice 2020, 34(8), 1383-1403.
  • Kessous S. Writing the Region in an Age of Globalization: Chicago and Its Cosmopolitan Subject(s) in Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. Midwestern Miscellany 2015, XLIII, 66-83.

• Book Chapter

  • Kessous S. A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld. In: Goody, A; Mackay, A, ed. Reading Westworld. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp.199-220.

• Reviews

  • Kessous S. Review: Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance by Zoe Hope Bulaitis. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 2022, 10(1), 1-8. In Press.
  • Kessous S. Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction [Book review]. Journal of American Studies 2019, 53(1), E17.