English staff

Dr Robert Lawson

Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics

As an award-winning academic with 15 years of experience investigating the relationship between language and society, Dr Robert Lawson has produced world-leading research with tangible real-world benefits, as well as establishing new research paradigms in media linguistics and applied language studies. Dr Lawson completed his...

Professor Gregory Leadbetter

Professor of Poetry, Course Director of the MA in Creative Writing, Director of the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing

Professor Gregory Leadbetter is a poet and critic. His research focuses on Romantic poetry and thought, the traditions to which these relate, and the history and practice of poetry more generally. He is the author of two poetry collections, Maskwork (2020) and The Fetch (2016), both with Nine Arches Press, as well...

Dr Gemma Moss

Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, Undergraduate English Courses Director

Before joining BCU, Gemma taught at the University of Salford and the University of Manchester, where she completed an MA in Postcolonial Literature and an AHRC-funded PhD. Gemma is author of Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is currently editing E. M. Forster’s first...

Jonathan Potter

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Dr Jonathan Potter read English at the University of Leicester where he also completed his PhD on intersections between literary and visual culture. This culminated in his first book, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave, 2018), and continues to be a major theme of his...

Professor Antoinette Renouf

Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics

Antoinette Renouf holds degrees from the Universities of East Anglia and Essex. Her research interests include lexis and lexical semantics, with particular focus on the relationship between textual word patterning and meaning; and automated text analysis for application in document retrieval and knowledge management. She is...

Professor David Roberts

Professor of English

David's research interests are in theatre and the history and practice of life writing. Publications include monographs for Oxford University Press, Methuen, Palgrave, and Cambridge University Press. He has also worked on major editions of classic texts, most recently of Congreve's The Way of the World (Methuen, 2020) and...

Naush Sabah

Lecturer in Creative Writing

As well as a lecturer in Creative Writing at BCU, Naush is a freelance writer, editor, and critic specializing in contemporary poetry. She is Editor and Publishing Director at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, a biannual periodical of contemporary poetry and poetry criticism, described by the TLS as ‘intellectually lithe...

Professor Philip Smallwood

Emeritus Professor of English

Philip Smallwood, BA (Oxon), M.Phil (Oxon), Ph.D. (London), is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham City University and at different times Honorary Visiting Fellow and Honorary Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of English, Bristol University. His teaching and research interests are in the late seventeenth and...

Dr Serena Trowbridge

Reader in Victorian Literature

Dr. Serena Trowbridge read English and Art History at King's College London, followed by an MA in textual studies at the University of Birmingham. Her PhD, entitled 'Christina Rossetti's Fractured Gothic', was completed at Birmingham City University in 2010, supervised by Professor Fiona Robertson. Her monograph Christina...

Demi Wilton

Lecturer in English Literature

Demi is a Lecturer in English Literature at BCU. Before beginning this role in 2024, Demi held positions as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project ‘Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon’ and Loughborough University’s ‘Women and the Making of James Joyce’s Ulysses’. Demi was awarded her PhD in English by...