Biography

Dr Sam Waterman is Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. He has teaching and research interests in 19th, 20th and 21st century Anglophone literature and literary theory. Sam also serves as the NU London Ambassador to Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Before joining NU London, Sam worked at the University of Chichester, and prior to this he received his BA in English Language and Literature and MA in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

Qualifications

PhD English (University of Pennsylvania)

MA Critical Theory (University of Sussex)

BA English Language and Literature (University of Sussex)

Research

Dr Waterman’s research interests are in 19th, 20th and 21st century literature and literary theory, with a particular focus on histories and theories of work, gender and sexuality studies, and affect theory. He is currently completing a monograph entitled After Men: Modernist Adventure and the Regendering of Work. Via the cultural form of ‘woman-centred adventure’, the project traces the emergence of post-industrial and feminised work ethics in the novels of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys. It includes an extended coda on the contemporary resonances of this cultural history in works by Zadie Smith, Shola von Reinhold, Sally Rooney and Raven Leilani. Sam is a regular participant at academic conferences and serves on the committee of the London Modernism Seminar. He welcomes PhD applicants in relation to any of the above areas.

Publications

Teaching London’s Past Today: An Experiential Approach to a Global City (The London Journal, forthcoming 2025)

Sally Rooney’s Sapiosexuals (Contemporary Literature, 2023)

Schlegel Capitalism: E.M. Forster and the Cultural Form of Modernist Adventure (Modernism/Modernity, 2022)

Review of At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole (Textual Practice, 2015)