Dr Daniel Abdalla

Personal Statement

My research ranges widely on literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day and focuses on the ways that authors engage with science, race, and the environment. I also serve as Deputy Director of the Literature and Science Hub Research Centre. Since 2018, I have been a core member and regular contributor to the digital reading project LitHits, which was developed alongside Oxford University Innovations; you can sign up for our weekly newsletter by clicking here.

My first monograph, Paths of Inheritance: Heredity in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1880-1930, is currently under review. It focuses on how four prominent American writers--Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins, and W. E. B. Du Bois--engaged with contemporary scientific theories of heredity in their literary works. I draw on extensive archival research and the neglected genres of these canonical authors' careers. Key to my approach is reading these authors through the lens of their own interests in the modern drama of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, WB Yeats, and Samuel Beckett.

My new research project 'Alternative Arctics' takes an innovative approach to writing about the North and South Poles by centring critically-neglected accounts of the poles by people of colour, women, and indigenous writers. Recently, work from the project has recently been selected to appear as part of the British Academy-Royal Irish Academy Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on the Future and has received collaborative SHAPE seed funding for upcoming projects..

My research was awarded a W. E. B. Du Bois Center Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2024 and the Ronald Bryden Scholarship by the International Shaw Society in 2022.

I also have ongoing projects on topics such as theatre and science; twentieth-century African-American theatre; forgotten women modernist writers; disability; and queer life writing.

I started at Liverpool as the William Noble Research Fellow in English in 2021 before becoming Lecturer in 2023. I completed my doctoral thesis in English at the University of Oxford (2021), where I was Esmond Harmsworth Graduate Scholar at the Rothermere American Institute; doctoral research assistant on the European Research-funded project Diseases of Modern Life; and fellow at the École normale supérieure, Paris. I completed my MA in English: 1850 to present at King's College London and my BA in English and History at Illinois State University.

I serve as executive committee member at the British Association for Modernist Studies, where I am chair of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. I am also a member of the British Society for Literature and Science, British Association for American Studies, International Shaw Society, and Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland.

I was on the organizing committee for the 2023 biennial conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, which I helped to host at the Literature and Science Research Hub. I also hosted the 2023 New Work in Modernist Studies Graduate Conference.

I'd be interested in hearing from prospective PhD students. My academic support and feedback hours are Fridays, from 3-5pm. E-mail me to make an appointment.