Dr Samuel Rogers

• Qualifications:BA, MA, PhD, PGCAPP, HEA Fellow
• Position:Programme Leader - English Literature
• Department:Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
• Telephone:+4411732 81789
• Email:Samuel.Rogers@uwe.ac.uk
• Social media:

About me

I am the Programme Leader for BA English Literature and BA English Literature with Writing. Both programmes have an excellent track record of student satisfaction and attainment. I am extremely proud to work with a great team of colleagues, helping our fantastic students build their passion for literature, hone their critical thinking, and sharpen their professional problem-solving skills.

As a member of the ACE Employability and Enterprise Committee, I am keen to enhance the delivery of professional skills and experiences for students. I lead the third-year module "Professional Development on Placement", which is a sandwich year placement option for students across humanities programmes. I also teach into the third-year "Writing in Practice" module, in which English Literature with Writing students gain valuable insight into creative workplaces.

I am devoted to maintaining high standards of excellence in both teaching and research. I am a member of the ACE Academic Standards and Quality Committee, as well as the ACE Research Ethics Committee. I have acted as an external expert in validating degree programmes at other universities, and I welcome future opportunities to act in this capacity. I am also the External Examiner for English and Creative Writing at a neighbouring institution. Within UWE, I am an Academic Professional Partner on the PGCAPP teaching team, where I support colleagues in critically reflecting on their professional practice.

I joined UWE in 2016, having taught at Bangor University since 2010. I have a substantial track record of teaching both English Literature and Creative Writing, covering texts from the Renaissance to the contemporary period. I am Module Leader for second-year "American Genres" and "The Black Atlantic". I also currently teach into first-year modules "The Child in Literature", "Genre and Creative Writing", and "Imagined Worlds".

In my spare time, I am a music reviewer. Some of my reviews (of more than fifty recent releases spanning ambient, drone, electronic, experimental, modern composition, and jazz) are published on long-standing website, A Closer Listen. 

I am open to enquiries about doctoral supervision. I am particularly interested in supervising PhDs which concern modern and contemporary poetry of Britain and America, or which analyse poetry in relation to place, spatial theory, identity, ecology, health, or wellbeing. PhD applicants should consider the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, which competitively funds projects to be co-supervised across two institutions. I am happy to work with applicants to strengthen their bids for this funding.

Area of expertise

My current research concerns the health and wellbeing value of poetry. I received competitive funding for this work, through the ACE-HAS Connection Research scheme and a Vice Chancellor's ECR Award. So far, my focus has been tracking the wellbeing effects of reading different styles of poetry. I organised a successful symposium with Psychology colleagues, bringing together experts from around the country. I also worked with students across the University to explore the dynamics of reading poetry in a group setting. I welcome all enquiries about this work, and am actively open to future collaboration in this area.

The other strand of my research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry from Britain and America, in relation to ideas of place and identity. My first monograph will focus on British poetry of the 1950s-1970s, presenting innovative comparisons between selected poets of the Movement (Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain) and of the British Poetry Revival (Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood). The manuscript is in the process of being revised for publication. Articles on Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood have been adapted from this work. In a related project, I have analysed the transatlantic genre of the long modernist, publishing an article on Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams.

I have substantial experience of commissioning and editing world-leading academic research. I am a Co-Editor (English/American) of the MHRA's flagship peer-reviewed journal, the Modern Language Review. I edited the 2021 Yearbook of English Studies, entitled "Contemporary British and Irish Poetry". This included an essay of mine on the poetry of Zoë Skoulding in relation to subject-object relations in the lyric genre. I am currently editing two books, one collecting essays on Skoulding's poetry, the other focusing on the contemporary poet Ian Davidson.

As a poet-critic, I use creative writing as a vital part of my research, in tandem with literary criticism.

I am currently seeking a publisher for my first chapbook of poetry, entitled "More on the Plums". This sequence of experimental texts explores questions of literary form, creative process, and machine learning. It began by feeding a single line of William Carlos Williams into a text-generating neural network. Using Artificial Intelligence to trigger the elusive "spark" of creative writing, I then used constrained, symmetrical forms to apply generative limitations. Extracts from this work have been published in PERVERSE, Poetrishy, Popshot, and Streetcake Magazine. Other examples of my poetry have appeared in Alchemy Spoon and Tears in the Fence.

My wider areas of interest include: poetic form and technique; poetry and memory; questions of space and place; literary explorations of nationhood and identity; connections between poetry and music; hip-hop poetics; modernism; ecocriticism; twentieth-century poetry; contemporary poetry since 1980; anarchist theory. Throughout all these interests, the connections between poetry, selfhood, locatedness, and temporality are the prevailing concerns of my research.

Publications

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