Dr. Edward Allen
Biography
I am an Associate Professor in modern British and Irish Literature, and a Fellow of Christ's College. I was brought up on the coast in rural Somerset, studied for my degrees in Cambridge, and have held research fellowships along the way at the Library of Congress (Washington DC), the Huntingdon Library (San Marino, California), Jesus College (Cambridge), the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), and the University of Padua.
Research Interests
I work for the most part on British, North American and European literatures of the period 1870-1980. My primary focus is sound and media culture; by that I mean I'm interested in broadcasting institutions like the BBC, in technological advances (radio, phonography, telephony, talkies), in the contact points between literary studies and musicology, and in things that may well be termed sonic curiosities (earworms, audiobooks, landlines, church bells). As well as attending to the listening habits of readers, and to the reading habits of listeners, I am drawn more broadly to the material conditions of reading at particular times in history, so I have interests too in book history, editorial practice and magazine culture.
From 2022 to 2024 I led a project at the University of Padua – 'Radio Waves: Network Building and the Making of Modern Europe' – which was designed to provide a fresh insight, amidst the fall-out of Brexit and ongoing crises of European integration, into the reconstruction of nations, blocs, and regional modes of identity after the Second World War. As Principal Investigator I worked closely with a team of postdocs with a view to triangulating the BBC with outfits in Italy and Greece, outfits which drew conspicuously on the model of a restructured BBC in the late 1940s. For more about this project, please see our website.
My recent work includes a book about sound media and modernist American poetry (centred on the writing of Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens); edited collections of essays on Dylan Thomas, on sub-genres of lyric poetry, and on literary fiction, disability, and the hearing sciences; and special journal issues dedicated to Moore's annotations and to Hemingway's attitude to Britain and British writers.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I contribute to the MPhil in English Studies (of which I am also the Director from 2024 to 2026), and I welcome all expressions of interest regarding postgraduate research in the areas I've outlined above. Recent doctoral students' topics include:
- Modernist radio culture
- Poetry, theology, and incantation
- Material dramaturgies on the modern stage
- Sound, poetry, and the American Civil War
- Politics of the short story in late-colonial India
Connect with Edward
Publications
Books
(ed.), The Nightfisherman Returns: Essays on the Craft of W. S. Graham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
(ed.), Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2025).
(ed.), Echoes of Paradise: Milton's Epic and the Art of Response (Cambridge: Christ's College, 2022): Christ's
(ed.), Forms of Late Modernist Lyric (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021 [paperback 2024]).
Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
(ed.), Reading Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019 [paperback 2020]).
Edited Special Issues
(ed.), '"All this fiddle": Marianne Moore’s Textual Diversions', Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary (forthcoming).
(ed.), 'Radio in and around Greece, 1937-61: Cultural Politics and Literary Cultures', Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 10.1 (2024).
(ed.), 'In – On – And: Hemingway, Britain, and the Nature of the Connection', Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary & Cultural Relations, 26.2 (2022).
(ed. with Beci Carver and James Purdon), 'Cooking with Trotter', Critical Quarterly, 61.4 (2019).
Articles and book chapters
'Sleuthing Deafness in Detective Fiction', in Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2025), pp. 114-41.
'On Moving Showstoppers: Stephen Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", There and Everywhere', Critical Quarterly, special issue on '"It might as well be Stephen": Essays in Appreciation of Sondheim', ed. Kasia Boddy and Clare Pettitt, 66.4 (2024), 13-32.
'The End of Timelessness? Islomania, Radio and the Awakening of Lawrence Durrell', Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 10.1 (2024), 207-28.
'Hemingway's Impressions: Learning to Voice the Classics in the Early Journalism', Symbiosis, 26.2 (2022), 151-71.
'Nocturne: J. H. Prynne Among the Stars', in Forms of Late Modernist Lyric (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), pp. 243-78.
'What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking Books', in Sound and Literature [Cambridge Critical Concepts Series], ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 211-33.
'Romancing the Phone: Woolf's First Media Age', Critical Quarterly, 61.4 (2019), 100-15.
'Dylan Thomas on the BBC Eastern Service', in Reading Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 110-37.
'Performing on the Fringe: Basil Bunting and Morden Tower', in Flower/Power: British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980, ed. Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 247-62.
'Ringing the Changes: Thomas Hardy's Communication Networks', in Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention, ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 19-32.
'"Spenser’s Ireland," December 1941: Scripting a Response', Twentieth-Century Literature, special issue on Marianne Moore, ed. Heather Cass White and Fiona Green, 63.4 (2017), 451-74. [Winner of the Marianne Moore Society Annual Essay Prize 2018]
'Towards a History of Pneumatics: Writing under Pressure, from Verne to Verne', Critical Quarterly, special issue on 'Traffic', ed. Beci Carver and James Purdon, 58.4 (2016), 27-49.
'Eliot’s Radio Times; or, Listen With Possum', in The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, ed. Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 275-86.
'On the Early Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Teasing, Typewriting, Editing', Textual Cultures, 9.1 (2014), 95-111 (available here).
'"One long, unbroken, constant sound": Wireless Thinking and Lyric Tinkering in Wallace Stevens's Harmonium', Modernism/modernity, 21.4 (2014), 919-36.
'"Visible Earshot": The Returning Voice of Susan Howe', Cambridge Quarterly, 41.4 (2012), 397-421.
Review essays, liner notes, and shorter pieces
'The Capulets and the Montagues' (review), Opera (May 2025), 756-58.
'Insistence and Resistance: Giacomo Puccini's Il trittico in a trio of productions', The Times Literary Supplement (1 November 2024), 14-15.
'Sacred Innovations', in I Was Glad: Parry Choral Music; sung by the Choir of Christ's College, Cambridge (2024, CD, Regent REGCD580), pp. 4-8.
'Cleverdon v. Clever Dons: Paradise Lost Becomes a Radio Drama', in Echoes of Paradise: Milton's Epic and the Art of Response (Cambridge: Christ's College, 2022), pp. 73-80.
'Lecturing to the Converted?' [on If Not Critical, by Eric Griffiths], Essays in Criticism, 71.4 (2021), 518-25.
'Play Time' [on The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue], Cambridge Quarterly, 47.1 (2018), 65-72.
'Peace Works', in Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’; Leonard Bernstein, ‘Chichester Psalms’; sung by the Choir of King's College Cambridge (2017, CD, KGS0021/SACD Hybrid), pp. 5-10.
'Omissions could be mistakes' [on Marianne Moore's New Collected Poems, ed. Heather Cass White; and Observations, ed. Linda Leavell], The Times Literary Supplement (15 September 2017), 9-10.
'A Presiding Spirit: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Afterlives', PN Review, 39.2 (2012), 22-25.
Book reviews
'Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude’ (review), International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, 5 (2018), 1-3.
'Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology' (review), Journal of American Studies, 50 (2016), 482-84.
'Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A.Rushing' (review), Critical Quarterly, 56.1 (2014), 99-102.
Other work includes an opera libretto and a chamber poem, with music in each case by Edwin Hillier. Serpentine; or, The Analysis of Beauty was performed at the Royal College of Music in May 2014, in collaboration with Tête à Tête; and Villanelle followed in December 2015 at St George's, Hanover Square, in collaboration with artists from Handel House.