Dr John Morton BA, MA, PhD, PGCertHE, SFHEA, RPA

Deputy Head, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Senior Lecturer, English Literature

Employability Lead, Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences

Undergraduate teaching:

• Literature and Publishing since 1820, Course Leader, Level 6 core course: lectures on Victorian, Modernist and contemporary literature and publishing
• Literature in Context: Poetry and Drama since 1800, level 5 core course: lectures on Victorian and modernist poetry
• Literature in Context: Fiction Since 1800, level 5 core course: lectures on Victorian, Modernist and contemporary fiction, and literary theory
• The Canon: A Short History of Western Literature, Course Leader, level 4 core course: lectures on the canon, Chaucer, Milton, Jane Eyre, Victorian and Modernist poetry
• Dr Morton also provides guest lectures for several courses on the English programme, including Literary Forms of Representation (level 4), and English in World Literature (level 6). In the past he has convened a level 6 optional course on the British novel in history, 1850-present, and he has taught on an interdisciplinary level 4 course, 'Ideas in Practice'.

Postgraduate teaching

• MA Literary London
• Unreal City: seminars on fictions of decadence in London
• Imagining the Metropolis: seminars on Gissing, Conrad, and T. S .Eliot
• Text and (Inter)Textuality: seminars on contemporary publishing and literary journalism

PhD supervision

Dr John Morton is currently supervising two PhDs:

• The responses to Victorian literature by mid-century British female novelists
• Modernism and education.

• Colby Prize, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, 2018
• Colby Prize, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, 2017

• Deputy Editor, Tennyson Research Bulletin (2011-)
• Member of Tennyson Society Publications Board
• Awarded Colby Prize for best book on nineteenth-century periodicals in 2017 (for The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers) and in 2018 (for Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies).
• Judge for the Colby Prize in 2019 and member of the organising committee for the 2021 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference.
• Dr John Morton reads for Literature and History and 19
• FHEA

Dr Morton's main research interest is Alfred Tennyson; his monograph Tennyson Among the Novelists, published in 2010, received enthusiastic reviews in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, and the Tennyson Research Bulletin. He is currently working on a book entitled 1850: A Literary Biography. This project ‘reads across’ the year 1850 in print, to produce a monograph documenting how the average English reader experienced the year, providing a radical rethinking of the literature of the period. 1850 is the year Tennyson inherited the Laureateship from Wordsworth, and the publication year of their respective In Memoriam and The Prelude; it was also the year in which Dickens published David Copperfield and founded Household Words. These are just a few of the significant literary works and events of that year. The book will consider the interrelations between these works and events, also focusing on popular literature, and will provide a comprehensive reading of a year whose significance in literature is equal to that of 1848 in politics.

Dr Morton is interested in the legacies of the Victorian age as they are manifested in the present day, and to this end has published several articles on Neo-Victorian poetry and fiction, focusing on the work of, among others, Mick Imlah, Ciaran Carson, Anthony Thwaite, Ruth Padel, and Alan Hollinghurst.

In addition to this, he has co-edited two prizewinning books, the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016), and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (2017) with Andrew King and Alexis Easley.

Article

Book section