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Staff Profile

Professor James Procter

Prof of Modern & Contemporary Lit

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 3518
Background

Research Websites


Background

I joined the School of English at Newcastle in 2006 after 7 years at the University of Stirling. Before that I was a postgraduate in the School of English at the University of Leeds.


School Roles

PGT Director (2022-)

REF2021 Coordinator for UoA27 (2018-2021)

Acting Head of School (2020-2021)

Director of Research (2015-2021)

PG Senior Tutor (2021)

Postgraduate Director (2010-2014)


External Roles

I have recently served as External Examiner on UG and PG programmes at the Universities of Warwick, Birmingham, Nottingham, Stirling, Leeds, QMUL and Essex.


I was Chief External Examiner at the Arab Open University (2017-2021).


I was Chair of the External Evaluation Committee for Language and Literature programmes (BA and PhD) at University of Cyprus (May 2018). At the University of Cyprus I was a member of the External Evaluation Committee for the evaluation/ accreditation process of Higher Education programmes in the field of English Language (September 2017).


I was Team Leader of the Quality Assurance Review of the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies (Mona) in November 2013.


I have acted as External Examiner for PhD and MA candidates at more than a dozen institutions in the UK, and internationally.





Research

Research Interests


My research focuses on what the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall once called ‘the outside history that is inside the history of English’. My overarching interest is in how literary and cultural production in Britain since the 1940s handles the period in which its empire comes home to roost. My work encompasses British and black British artists and intellectuals, including migrant and diasporic writing from the Caribbean, African and South Asia.


My current research interests are in radio literature and empire between the 1930s and late 1960s. I am particularly interested in recovering the neglected archive of literary production at the BBC by West African and West Indian writers. I started this work in 2009, and was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete it in 2013-14. Hundreds of writers in this archive are now forgotten. Many others have become canonical names of world literature: V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola.


More broadly, I am interested in the overlaps between radio and other dominant technologies of communication during the mid-twentieth century, including magazines and newspapers. How, for instance, did seriality and the short, segmented spaces associated with air time and the magazine column shape West Indian and West African writing at the end of empire? In turn, how were these mass media shaped by that pioneering generation of post-colonial writers?


My previous (and ongoing) research interests are in readership and reception within the context of migration, transnationalism and diaspora. Between 2007 and 2010 I was Principal Investigator on a large AHRC-funded project 'Devolving Diaporas' (http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com). This project worked with reading groups in public libraries, British Council offices and homes right across the UK (from Penzance to Glasgow), in the Caribbean West Africa, India, and Canada.


PhD Supervision

I have supervised 16 PhD students to completion, 9 of them AHRC-funded. Their projects cover the areas of black British literature, postwar British literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary literature and diaspora literature. I welcome applications from students in any of these areas.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Literatures of Decolonisation (stage 2)

Postwar British Fiction (stage 3)


Postgraduate

I teach on the MA in Literature



Publications