William Holbrook, Trinity

Biographical Information

I took a BA and an LLB at the University of Queensland and then completed an Honours year at the University of Melbourne, where I won the Bowen Prize for the best dissertation in English for my thesis on John Ruskin's afterlives in the works of W. B. Yeats and Walter Benjamin. I then came to Cambridge for an MPhil, funded by a Trinity College External Graduate Studentship, on D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. My PhD is jointly funded by a Trinity College External Studentship, a Ramsay Centre Postgraduate Scholarship, and a University of Melbourne Rae and Edith Bennet Travelling Scholarship. I am the honorary holder of the University of Cambridge Jebb Studentship. 

I supervise on: Part IA Paper 1 (Practical Criticism and Critical Practice I), Part IA Paper 2 (Shakespeare), Part IB Paper 7A (English Literature 1830-1945), Part IB Paper 7B (English Literature 1870 to the present), Part II Paper 1 (Practical Criticism and Critical Practice II), Part II Paper 2 (Tragedy), Part II Paper 16 (History and Theory of Literary Criticism), and Part II Paper 17 (Lyric). I also have experience as an Outreach Tutor for Trinity College and as a supervisor on the Jesus College-Harvard University exchange program. 

Research Interests

I research connections between place, politics, and Anglophone literature and criticism in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am interested in antipodean modernism; the cultures of Anglo settler-colonialism; the figure of the ocean in geo-mythology; ideologies of land and sea in modern literature; the rise and decline of academic literary criticism; radical conservatism; arguments within English marxism; the British New Left; the origins of Cultural Studies; etc. Key authors and critics include: D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, and John Ruskin. My thesis examines connections between D. H. Lawrence's aesthetic and political thought in the period 1914-1922.

In 2023 I co-convened the Antipodean Modernism Today conference in the Faculty of English, as well as Ern's Night, an evening of poetry readings in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the death of Australian poet Ernest Lalor Malley. 

I am a member of both the Harvard University Association for Global Political Thought and the Atelier Théorie Critique, hosted by the Institut interdisciplinaire d'anthropologie du contemporain at EHESS. I write occassionally on issues in political theory and economy for Jacobin, The Sydney Review of Books, and the Australian quarterly Arena.