Professor Stewart Mottram
| Biography | Stewart Mottram is Professor of Literature and Environment with a research focus on the writing of flood risk regions across time. He leads the AHRC project, From Noah to Now: A cultural history of flooding in English coastal and estuary communities. Stewart collaborates with environmental specialists from across the humanities and sciences to foreground the history of flooding and its role in shaping the literatures and cultures of North Sea regions that continue to live with flood risk today. He also leads the AHRC/XR Stories funded Rising Tide of Humber project, which recreates historical flooding within the Humber estuary using virtual reality in order to raise awareness of today's changing climate (risingtide.hull.ac.uk). Stewart has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2008-10) and AHRC (2014-15). He was Co-I on the AHRC Risky Cities project at Hull (2020-23) and is Co-Director of the University of Hull's Centre for Water Cultures. Stewart is author of over 25 publications, including two research monographs and a co-edited collection, and he is particularly recognized for his work on Hull poet, Andrew Marvell (1621-78). His most recent book, ‘Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. His research on Andrew Marvell and medical cures for malaria in seventeenth-century England was first reported in The Observer newspaper in August 2020, and is available to read open access in the journal The Seventeenth Century (2021). Stewart is also a published poet, and his latest poem, ‘In Search of Appleton’, is out now with Broken Sleep Books as part of a new collection of poems - ‘Companions of his Thoughts More Green’ (2022) - to mark the 400th anniversary of Andrew Marvell’s birth. Stewart is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), a Fellow of the RSA (FRSA), and a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College. |
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| Research Interests | Literature and environment, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, seventeenth-century studies, digital heritage, arts and heritage community engagement. |
| Teaching and Learning | Level 4 - Poetry, Past and Present (module leader) Level 5 - Writing the Environment (module leader) Level 6 - Dissertation (supervisor) Level 7 - Climate Fiction (module leader) - Dissertation (supervisor) |
| Scopus Author ID | 56163427100 |
| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |
| PhD Topics | Stewart is an interdisciplinary researcher with particular strengths in environmental approaches to English literature and a focus on the literature of flood risk regions across the North Sea. He welcomes enquiries from potential research students (Masters and PhD) who wish to work on the following broad themes, in any period from 1400 onwards: - Literature and environment (water and flood, estuary cultures, the green-blue humanities) - Literature and disease (histories of malaria, plague, typhus) Completed PhDs I have supervised the following projects to successful completion in recent years: - Jonathan Morton, Conventions are forever: the influence of Medieval romance narrative on female agency in the Bond film franchise (2023). External examiner, Professor James Chapman (Leicester). - Rebecca Devine, Epistolary Larkin: Letters, Life, and the Literary Biography (2022). External examiner, Professor Richard Bradford (Ulster) - Louise Powell, The Crisis of Masculinity: Twins, Early Modern Medicine, and Drama, 1594-1655 (2018). - Kaylara Ann Reed, Writing Reform in 14th-century English Romance (2017). External examiner, Professor Raluca Radulescu (Bangor). - Amy Albudri, Phantasmal Morgans and Other Women (2016). External examiner, Dr Rob Gossedge (Cardiff). Current PhD supervisions I currently act as first supervisor for the following six PhD projects: Helen Keighley: Performing Heritage: Processes of Narrative Creation at Heritage Visitor Attractions Bethany Lettington: Creature and Community: Water Mythology in Poetry of the British Isles from Early Modern to Present Day Xin Lim: Water as a Frontier: Environmental Colonialism and Native American Resistance in Early Modern Virginia Mary Rehman: ‘Shut up’: Pandemic Lockdowns and Health Inequalities, 1600 to present day Anna Stevenson: Ted Hughes’ Mythic Poets: Reflections on the Inner Self and Divine Power Felicity Wood: English Literature, Water, Health, and Wellbeing in Estuary Communities, 1500-1700 |