Matthew Jordan
Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural History
Research Interests
My research is motivated by a concern with the politics, culture, history and philosophy of modernity (in that order, I think); at the eccentric epicentre of which cluster agitates the work of John Milton.
Current Projects
I am completing a book for Palgrave Macmillan entitled Twenty-First Century Literary Theory. I am also working on A Reader's Guide to "Paradise Lost" for the same publisher. In addition, I have produced a number of papers and publications which have emerged from work in progress on a project about Milton's involvement in the early stages of the English Revolution.
Publications (Selected)
Books
Milton and Modernity: Politics, Masculinity, and "Paradise Lost" (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
Journal Articles
"How Stanley Fish Works," New Formations 48 (Winter 2002-3), 137-42
"Marxism not Manhood: Accommodation and Impasse in Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club," Men and Masculinities 4.4 (2002), 368-79
Book Chapters
"The Bourgeois Utopianism of Milton's Anti-Prelatical Tracts" in Christophe Tournu & Neil Forsyth (eds.), Milton in France (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008)
"Determined Dissent: John Milton and the Futures of Political Culture" in Timothy Bewes & Jeremy Gilbert (eds), Cultural Capitalism: Politics After New Labour (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000), 101-116
External Professional Activities
I am a founder member and director of Shakespeare North, the body responsible for the development of the Prescot Playhouse Project. This aims to mark Shakespeare's links with what may have been the only free-standing Elizabethan playhouse outside London, at Prescot, by establishing a theatre and community resource near the original site.
Visiting Associate Professor, Brown University, 2001-2.
Postgraduate Teaching and Supervision
I teach the Theory component on the Department's Master of Research Programme. I have served on a number of MPhil/PhD supervisory teams.
Teaching: Undergraduate
I teach on a range of modules across all three levels including "Reading Revolutions: Crisis and Change in Seventeenth-Century Britain," "Perspectives on Shakespeare," "Contemporary Poetry," and "Modernities," a core module on our degree in English Literature and Creative Technology.
