Susan Bruce

Biography

I read English at the University of Cambridge and took my MA and PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I’ve taught at the Universities of Florence, Geneva and St Andrews as well as at Keele, and was Head of the School of Humanities at Keele from 2009-2014. 

I am a former Chair of University English (the subject association for HE English in the UK,) and of the Arts and Humanities Alliance, an umbrella group of around 50 UK Arts and Humanities Learned Societies. I served on the UUK Open Access Monograph subgroup and the British Academy Strategic Forum for the Arts and Humanities. I am currently Deputy Chair of the review group of the English Subject Benchmark Statement for the QAA. I am a Fellow of the English Association.

Research and scholarship

My doctoral research was a feminist study of Utopian fiction in the early modern period, out of which issued my anthology of Three Early Modern Utopias for Oxford World's Classics. I remain interested in utopian fiction and in feminism, but my interests are wide-ranging: I have written on Shakespeare, on representations of memory, history and photography in inter-war literature; on intersections between fiction and economy; and on the nature and value of English and the Humanities more generally. A recent interest is Medical Humanities: I have published on television medical dramas and the state of the NHS and am currently completing an article on William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus.