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Professor Martin Halliwell
BA, MA (Exeter), PhD (Nottingham), FRSA
Professor of American Studies & Head of the School of English
Chair of the British Association for American Studies
Contact Details:
- E: mrh17@le.ac.uk
- T: +44 (0)116 252 2645
- F: +44 (0)116 252 2065
Research Interests
Martin Halliwell's research interests span twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, US cultural and intellectual history, American film after 1945, the history of medicine and psychology, critical theory, and avant-garde culture. He has published work on the history of ideas, transatlantic literature and culture, American and European modernism, religion, psychoanalysis, medicine and psychiatry, film, and popular music. He is the author of seven books and one edited collection.
Martin Halliwell was Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford in 2007, where began work on his current project Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry and American Culture, 1945-1970 , which will be published by Rutgers University Press in early 2013.
His cultural history of progressive rock Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s (with Paul Hegarty) was published by Continuum in Summer 2011 and has been reviewed in The Wire, Record Collector, Classic Rock and Jazzwise. Record Collector named it one of the music books of 2011.
He is Series Editor of two series with Edinburgh University Press: a nine-volume series Twentieth-Century American Culture and Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature (with Andy Mousley) which has fifteen titles currently published, with ten more in press or planned.
He was co-organiser (with George Lewis) of the 52nd British Association for American Studies Conference (PDF) hosted by the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester in April 2007, and he organised the 50 Years In Space (PDF) colloquium (in collaboration with the Leicester Space Research Centre) held at the National Space Centre in Leicester, in spring 2007. He was alos co-organizer (with Joel Rasmussen) of an international conference to commemorate the William James Centenary at the Rothermere American Institute in September 2010: William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Philosophy of Religion (PDF).
Martin Halliwell is the current Chair of the British Association for American Studies, after serving as Vice-Chair of BAAS for two years. He is a member of the English Language and Literature Subpanel for REF 2014; a board member of the United Kingdom Council for Area Studies Associations (UKCASA); an active member of CCUE, and of the Intellectual History Group based at Jesus College Cambridge. He is also a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and an AHRC Strategic Reviewer. Professional membership includes the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), the American Studies Association (ASA), and the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the English Association, he is also Associate Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford and Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, where he is a member of the ISA Advisory Board.
Projects
Current Postgraduate Supervision
Martin Halliwell teaches on the MA Modern Fiction, MA English Studies and MA Humanities & American Studies. He has supervised postgraduate dissertations on Literary Adaptations, Alfred Hitchcock, Michel Foucault, John Updike, Henry James, Tennessee Williams, Henry Miller, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, William Burroughs, Disability and Literature, Avant-Garde Writing, Cult Fiction, Beat Fiction, and Ethnicity in American Culture.
He has externally examined seventeen PhDs and has supervised seven research students to completion. He would be very keen to supervise topics at Masters and PhD level that fall within the following areas:
- Postwar American Writing
- American Film 1945-2000
- 1950s and 1960s American Culture
- American and European Modernism
- American Intellectual History
- Transatlantic Literature and Culture
- The Avant-Garde
- American Visual Culture
- Literary Adaptations
- Disability and Modern/Contemporary Culture
- American Ethnicity and Race
- American Pragmatism
- The History of American Psychology and Psychoanalysis
Teaching and Administration
Martin Halliwell teaches across the range of American literature from the Revolutionary period through to contemporary America, with a special interest in early twentieth-century literature and post-World War II American fiction. He teaches American film, visual culture, critical theory and popular music, and offers the MA module Literature and Exile: American Writers in Paris.
- AM2011: The City (American Studies students)
- AM2013 Ethnicity and Diversity in American Literature 1950-2000 (American Studies and English & American Studies students)
- EN3005 & AM3040: Containment and Resistance in 1950s and 1960s American Culture (English, American Studies and Film Studies)
- AM3042: American Culture after 9/11 (American Studies and Film Studies)
Martin Halliwell is the Head of the School of English and also North American Year Abroad Coordinator.
He is a member of the College of Arts, Humanities and Law Management Board and University Senate.
Recent Publications
- Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s, with Paul Hegarty (Continuum, 2011)
- 'The Modernist Atlantic: New York, Chicago, and Europe', in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et al (Oxford UP, 2010)
- 'Cold War Ground Zero: Medicine, Psyops and the Bomb', Journal of American Studies, 43.3 (2010), 313-32
- 'Modernist Triangulations: Transnational, International, National', in American Modernism: Cultural Transactions, ed. Morley and Goody (2009)
- 'No Place to Go, See': Blindness and World War II Demobilization Narratives', Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability, 3.2 (2009), 163-82
- American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, with Catherine Morley (Edinburgh & Columbia University Press, 2008)
- American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
