Staff Profiles

The Centre for South West Writing includes expertise from our Streatham Campus in Exeter and also from Tremough in Cornwall.

Andy Brown is the Director of the Centre for Creative Writing and Arts. He is a published poet whose work explores place, identity, environmental perspectives, and ideas of self.

Christine Faunch has responsibility for archives and manuscripts in Special Collections. Her role is to develop the collections by increasing access to them, encouraging and developing cataloguing and research projects and acquiring new archive material. She is also responsible for managing the Special Collections reading room and the CALM database.

Jessica Gardner is Head of Special Collections, within the University's Academic Services. She has significant curatorial and research experience relating to literary archives, which are actively collected at Exeter. She is also a committee member for UK GLAM (Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts) and has presented a number of papers on the value of literary papers for research and learning

Marion Gibson is Senior Lecturer in English at the Cornwall Campus. Her research interests include the literature of British ethnic and tribal identities from the Dark Ages to the present, especially as these relate to myth, paganism and mysticism; and 'Celtic' identities with special reference to Cornwall.

Jo Gill is Lecturer in the English Department. Her research interests encompass modern poetry (including the work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), confession and life-writing, feminism and popular culture, poetry and place (especially the literature of the suburbs).

Nick Groom is Director of Research at the Cornwall Campus. His research interests include Literature and the environment; national and regional identities; ballads and popular culture; Thomas Chatterton; the Romantics and the South West; Sabine Baring-Gould.

Philip Hensher's novels include Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Mulberry Empire, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Northern Clemency, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and named by amazon.com (America) as the best book of any sort published in 2008. He is also the author of the libretto of Thomas Ades's opera Powder Her Face, which has had over forty productions worldwide. Philip is one of Granta's 'Best of Young British Novelists' and the youngest writer to be included in A.S.Byatt's definitive Oxford Book of the English Short Story. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature at the age of 34, and included in Who's Who at 37. In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery acquired a portrait of him by Alexander McIntyre. He has also written for almost every national newspaper, and is currently Chief Book Reviewer for the Spectator and art critic for the Mail on Sunday, as well as writing a weekly column for The Independent.

Adeline Johns-Putra is Lead Academic at the Tremough campus. Her particular research interest is in relationship between literature and place.

Tim Kendall is Head of English and Director of the Centre for South West Writing. He lists among his research interests William Golding, Ivor Gurney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Sam North is a novelist and screenwriter who lectures in Creative Writing. He has recently become a Trustee of the new South West Literature agency at Cyprus Well.

Philip Payton is Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies and Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University's Cornwall Campus. He is interested in the literary history of modern Cornwall, and recent books include A.L. Rowse and Cornwall: A Paradoxical Patriot (University of Exeter Press, 2005; paperback 2007) and John Betjeman and Cornwall: 'The Celebrated Cornish Nationalist' (University of Exeter Press, 2010), both of which draw extensively on holdings in the Special Collection at Exeter.

Angelique Richardson works on late nineteenth-century writers and discourses of science and medicine. She is Senior Lecturer in English. She is on the editorial boards of the three international journals - the Hardy Review, the Thomas Hardy Journal and the Hardy Society Journal - as well as being a member of the Thomas Hardy Society (UK), and a founding co-organiser of the first International Postgraduate Symposium on Hardy at the International Thomas Hardy Conference. She is now co-organizing the third symposium (July 2010) and co-organizing a conference on Hardy at Yale (June 2011).

Helen Taylor is Professor of English & American Literature, Department of English. Primarily a scholar of the American South, she edited The Daphne du Maurier Companion (2007) and has participated in the Du Maurier Festival since its inception. Since 2003 she has been a Board member of Bath Festivals.