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 and is Consortium Lead for the AHRC (with NERC) Living Well with Water Doctoral Focal Awards in the Arts and Humanities. These awards will support 39 doctoral studentships between 2026-33 to help build healthier, more water-resilient coastal communities in the face of environmental and climate change.
Stewart is Co-Director of the University of Hull's Centre for Water Cultures. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2008-10) and AHRC (2014-15, 2024-25) and was Co-I on the AHRC Risky Cities project at Hull (2020-23).
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 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.
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)
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 is Director of the Living Well with Water Doctoral Focal Awards in the Arts and Humanities programme at the University of Hull.
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:
- Helen Keighley, Volunteers Performing Heritage: Processes of Narrative Creation and Presentation at Heritage Visitor Attractions (2025). External examiner, Dr Mary Brooks (Durham)
- Anna Stevenson, ‘My Sacred Canon’: The Influence of Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot on the Young Ted Hughes (2024). External examiners, Dr Mark Wormald (Cambridge), Dr Steve Ely (Huddersfield)
- 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 five PhD projects:
Bethany Lettington: Creature and Community: Water Mythology in Poetry of the British Isles from Early Modern to Present Day. Funded by Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures
Xin Lim: Water as a Frontier: Environmental Colonialism and Native American Resistance in Early Modern Virginia. Funded by Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures
Natasha Miro: Great Flood Stories and What They Teach us: Applying Lessons from Cross-Cultural Diluvial Traditions. Funded by Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures
Mary Rehman: ‘Shut up’: Pandemic Lockdowns and Health Inequalities, 1600 to present day. Funded by University of Hull Transatlantic Cultures of Incarceration Scholarships Cluster.
Felicity Wood: English Literature, Water, Health, and Wellbeing in Estuary Communities, 1500-1700. Funded by Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures
