Andy Conway
Visiting Lecturer
Andy Conway is a novelist and screenwriter based in Birmingham, who graduated from the School of English in 1994 with a 1st in English Language and Literature. He teaches undergraduate courses in Screenwriting, Drama and Adaptation in the School, and also teaches Screenwriting at The National Academy of Writing, Worcester University and Newman College. He has also taught courses on James Joyce's Ulysses and Sceptical Narrative at Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, Hungary.
His first feature film, Arjun & Alison is released in 2011, and he has published several novels, including The Girl with the Bomb Inside, Train Can't Bring Me Home (originally written while a student in the School), The Budapest Breakfast Club, The Striker's Fear of the Open Goal, Touchstone and Lovers in Paris. His novella, The Very Thought of You, has recently been optioned for a forthcoming Hollywood movie.
He has also had fiction published in literary journals as diverse as Stand Magazine, Cascando, Ellipsis, People to People and Minerva's New Writing 3 anthology.
Andy runs the Shooting People Screenwriters Network bulletin, which goes out to 11,000 writers worldwide every day.
Dr Gregory Leadbetter
Lecturer in Creative Writing / Deputy Director, MA in Writing
Gregory Leadbetter is a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, and of the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, London. After winning a Research Studentship for the project, he completed his PhD on Coleridge at Oxford Brookes University.
He is a poet, critic and scriptwriter. A collection of his poems, entitled The Body in the Well, was published by HappenStance Press in 2007, and his poems have been commended in the Arvon Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Strokestown Poetry Prize. His monograph on Coleridge’s poetry and poetics, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Between 2005 and 2007, he was a scriptwriter for the BBC radio drama series Silver Street. In 2010, he was Poet in Residence at Radley College, Abingdon.
He teaches creative writing at postgraduate and undergraduate level, and lectures on English Literature 1660-1830.
Ian Marchant
Lecturer
Ian Marchant is a lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of English. A novelist, playwright and presenter, he is the former co-centre director of the Arvon Foundation’s house at Totleigh Barton, and is an experienced Arvon tutor.
He has published six books, including travel memoirs Parallel Lines and The Longest Crawl (Bloomsbury), both of which were critically acclaimed, The Sunday Sport, The Church of England Newspaper and Something of the Night (Simon and Schuster).
As a playwright, Ian has co-written White Open Spaces, which was nominated for a South Bank Show award in 2007 after it was performed at Edinburgh, the West End in London and at the National Theatre of Sweden in Stockholm.
His monologue for the play Joy’s Prayer was broadcast on BBC Radio Four as part of the Woman’s Hour serialisation of White Open Spaces. Other radio work includes presenting A Load of Rubbish, for BBC Radio Four (December 2008) and documentary Top Deck for BBC Radio Four (January 2009).
Ian presented a film for ITV Border about the engineer Thomas Telford in 2007, which was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award, and a four-part series for the same channel, Fun For Some (2008).
He has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, The Times and The Sunday Times and makes regular appearances as a guest speaker at literary festivals and for student groups.
Professor Fiona Robertson
Research Professor in English
Fiona Robertson joined the School of English in 2004 as Research Professor of English Literature. Her previous posts were as Reader in English at the University of Durham (1990-2004), Baring Junior Research Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford (1987-90), and Lecturer at Pembroke and St Anne's Colleges, Oxford. She has a BA, MPhil, and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and has held visiting fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford, the Huntington Library, California, the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as fellowships for specific projects awarded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.
She is the Director of Birmingham City University's MA in Writing, and supervises PhD theses in eighteenth- to twentieth-century British and American literature. She has been external examiner at the universities of Leeds, Liverpool, and (for doctoral degrees) Oxford, Durham, Birmingham, and Liverpool; and has held advisory roles for universities and funding bodies in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and Singapore.
Fiona Robertson was a member of the Sub-Panel for English during the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, and is currently a member of the Sub-Panel for English in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. She serves on the advisory and editorial committees of other scholarly organisations, including the Centre for Romantic Studies at the University of Bristol and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.
Her main research interests lie in British Literature of the Romantic Period. She has published several critical and editorial studies of Walter Scott, including Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford, 1994), The Bride of Lammermoor (Oxford, 1991), and the new Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 2012). She has also published a collection of works by women writers of the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2001) and an edition of the works of Stephen Crane (Oxford, 1998). Her new monograph is The United States in British Romanticism (Oxford, 2012). She is working on other projects in nineteenth-century British and American writing, including the new Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, a monograph on the emblematic, and essays for The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism and Rethinking Romantic History, 1700-1840.