Dr Samuel Rogers

• Qualifications:BA, MA, PhD, PGCAPP, HEA Fellow
• Position:Associate Director (Literature / Linguistics / Creative ＆ Professional Writing)
• Department:School of Arts
• Telephone:+4411732 81789
• Email:Samuel.Rogers@uwe.ac.uk
• Social media:

About me

I am an Associate Director of the School of Arts, with leadership of the following areas: English Language and Linguistics; English Literature; Creative and Professional Writing. This cluster of subjects represents the broad-church discipline of English Studies. My role is to champion this area within UWE whilst forging new connections and initiatives. I have strategic oversight of four undergraduate programmes and managerial responsibility for a team of more than twenty fantastic experts.  

I am devoted to maintaining high standards of excellence in both teaching and research. I am a member of the School's Board of Studies and the College's 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 currently the External Examiner for English and Creative Writing at two neighbouring institutions. Within UWE, I am an Academic Professional Partner on the PGCAPP team, where I support colleagues in critically reflecting on their professional practice.

As a Senior Lecturer, I have a substantial track record of teaching both English Literature and Creative Writing, covering texts from the Renaissance to the contemporary period. I previously served as the Programme Leader for BA English Literature and BA English Literature with Writing at UWE. During this tenure, I led a diversification of our assignment types to enable a diverse range of skills and capabilities to be showcased by our students. I am currently Module Leader for second-year module "The Black Atlantic: From the Middle Passage to Hip-Hop", which encompasses poetry, short fiction, and song lyrics by Black authors from Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe.

In my spare time (currently curtailed by a demanding toddler!), 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 poem", 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 my own creative practice 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, The Contemporary Journal, 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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