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.

My first monograph on heredity in American literary culture is forthcoming in the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series. The monograph focuses on how four prominent American writers--Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins, and W. E. B. Du Bois--engaged with global, modernist drama in order to explore contemporary scientific theories of evolution. Work related to the project has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Drama,The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Drama (co-authored with Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr, Oxford), as well as Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature (with Alexandra Paddock, Oxford, and Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr). Research for this project has been supported by 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.

Since 2021, I have been developing a project called 'Alternative Arctics'; it 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 with collaborators from across the UK and Ireland..

Since 2018, I have been a core member, alongside Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr and Alexandra Paddock, of the digital reading project LitHits, which was developed alongside Oxford University Innovations; you can sign up for our weekly newsletter by clicking here.

Related to these projects, I also have active interests in theatre and science; twentieth-century African-American theatre; forgotten women modernist writers; disability; and queer life writing. I also currently 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 helped to organize the 2023 biennial conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, as well as the 2023 New Work in Modernist Studies Graduate Conference.

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 research 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.

Prospective PhD students are encouraged to contact me. My academic support and feedback hours are Fridays, from 3-5pm. E-mail me to make an appointment.