Liam Michael Plimmer, St John's

Biographical Information

I first came to Cambridge in 2017 as a first-generation student from a low-income family to study for a BA in English at Downing College, graduating with a double first with distinction in 2020. During my time as an undergraduate, I was the recipient of a number of academic awards, including the Betha Wolferstan Rylands Prize, the F. R. Leavis Prize (twice), and the Whalley-Tooker Prize. After leaving Cambridge, I completed an MSt in English Literature, 1900-Present as a Clarendon Scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating with a distinction in 2021. I then returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD as a Benefactors' Scholar at St. John's College.

For the academic year 2024-25, I was a Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.

Research Interests

My PhD dissertation examines the origins of the Künstlerroman [artist-novel] in German romanticism and its ‘translation’ into Anglo-American literature, with chapters on Henry James, Ernest and Mary McNeil Fenollosa, and Willa Cather.

My other areas of interest include the Bildungsroman; German idealism and romanticism; modernist prose fiction; Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, and the Bloomsbury Group; Vladimir Nabokov; twentieth-century philosophy and literary criticism; Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Theodor W. Adorno; Marxism; literature and religion; and medieval intellectual history, especially Wycliffism/Lollardy (see my article published in Neophilologus).

Selected Publications

'The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy', Neophilologus 107 (2023), 485-502. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09751-8)