BA, MA, DPhil (Sussex)

Professor of American Studies,
Pro-Vice-Chancellor and
Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Law

Email: prof.d.tallack@le.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2841
Fax: +44 (0)116 252 5213

Research Summary

Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Law.  He holds honorary guest professorships at Tsinghua  University, Beijing, and Shanghai International Studies University, and was Grolier Club (New York) Fellow (2008). He has been a member of the UK Government’s Marshall Commission and the Advisory Board of the Observatory for Borderless Education, as well as local school and college governing bodies. He directed the 3Cities project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

• Professor Tallack's Publications

Research areas

• American fiction
• American intellectual and cultural history
• Visual culture and theory
• Urban culture, history and literature
• Critical theory
• Modernism and postmodernism

Current Research

Visual Commissions: New York 1870s-1920s

Artists and journeyman illustrators, project- and freelance-photographers, and map- and diagram-makers, represented New York, from its subway tracks and service ducts through to the now-famous sights of a city whose growth-spurt, either side of 1900, coincided with the invention and refinement of the last categories of visual media before our own digital era.

Initially, a series of articles seeks to make unpromising, as well as famous, images communicate again, across the years, by reconstructing core questions as visual commissions.  These commissions also pose overlooked theoretical and methodological questions that bear upon debates in iconology, visuality and historical evidence.

Postgraduate Supervision

Douglas Tallack has supervised over twenty PhD students to completion, and is very very keen to supervise topics at Masters and PhD level that fall within his research areas (listed above).