Luke Davies

Biography

Biography

Before joining Keele, I completed an AHRC funded doctoral degree at University College London in 2016 and a postdoctoral fellowship at Tübingen University in 2018. My monograph The Tramp in British Literature 1850-1950 was shortlisted for the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize in 2022.

Research and scholarship

Research and scholarship

My main academic research interest is productivism and its cultural manifestations in late modern British culture. Other research interests include British nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary representations of poverty and critical theory.

Teaching

Teaching

ENGLISH:

• Reading Literature (ENG-10026)
• Literature and Social Change (ENG-20064)
• Literature and History: Writing the Americas (ENG-10036)
• Methods and Approaches to Literature (ENG-20066)
• High Culture: Drink, Drugs, and the American Dream (AMS-30038)
• Classic Novels on Screen (ENG-20082)
• Canon, Anti-Canon, Context (ENG-40032)

FILM:

• Introduction to Television Studies (FIL-10006)
• Adaptation (FIL-20011)
• Science Fiction Cinema: Utopias and Dystopias (FIL-200005)
• Villains and Vigilantes on Screen (FIL-30023)

CREATIVE WRITING:

• Fiction Through Practice (ENG-10023)

Publications

Publications

BOOKS

• The Tramp in British Literature, 1850-1950 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 340 pp.

ARTICLES

• “György Lukács and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 71-2 (2023): 127-144.
• "Representing the Tramp in British Interwar Social Exploration Literature: Frank Jennings, Frank Gray and George Orwell." English Studies 103-6 (2022): 871-898. 
• “Representing the Poor: The Emergence of the ‘Point-of-View’ Mode in Interwar Documentary Film, Mass Observation and the Publications of Victor Gollancz Ltd.” Twentieth-Century Literature 68-1 (2022): 1-24. 
• “‘Progressing Backwards’: Rural Outsider Figures in Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas.” English Studies 103-10 (2021): 1-25. 
• “Appropriating the Abject: Witchcraft in Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s Suspiria (1977) and David Kajganich and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Remake.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 18-1&2 (2020): 43-59.

BOOK CHAPTERS

• “Precarious Living in the Films of Ken Loach” in Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding-houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2018): 145-160.
• “Degrowth Theory and Kohei Saito: New Directions for Literary and Cultural Criticism” in British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700, ed. John Goodridge (University of London Press, 2024, under contract).
• “Platforming the Poor in 1920s Britain: Habermas, Foucault, and the Politics of Display” in The 1920s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, ed. Nick Hubble (Bloomsbury, 2024, under contract).

JOURNAL REVIEWS

• “Alistair Robinson’s Victorian Vagrancy: A Cultural History of the Wandering Poor.” Journal of Victorian Culture (2022): Web. 23 May 2022.
• “Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use.” European Journal of American Studies 2017-2: Web. 1 Aug. 2017.
• “Luke Seaber’s Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature.” George Orwell Society Journal 11 (2016): 30-37.
• “Robert Colls’ George Orwell: English Rebel.” George Orwell Studies 1 (2016): 112-121.