Professor Berthold Schoene
Professor of English
My profile
Biography
Following an MA in English and Scandinavian Studies (Freiburg) and a PhD in Scottish Literature (Glasgow) I lectured in universities in both Germany and the UK, including Dundee, Chemnitz, Swansea, South Wales, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester. Since 2004 I am Professor of English at Manchester Met, with responsibility for an ever-expanding research management portfolio, currently ranging across nine departments and four large university research centres.
I have led on three national research assessment exercises (RAE2008, REF2014, REF2021), the most recent of which returned 297 researchers to seven units of assessment. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities — which includes the Manchester School of Art, the Manchester Fashion Institute, the Manchester School of Architecture, the new School of Digital Arts (SODA), the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, the Manchester Writing School and the Policy Evaluation Research Unit (PERU) — contributed 41% of the university’s total REF return, which makes Arts and Humanities the largest research-intensive faculty in the university. The REF2021 results place Art & Design and English among the national top 10 for research power, out of 86 and 92 institutions respectively. We received 100% internationally excellent and world-leading environment scores in Art and Design, English and History. The overall percentage of internationally excellent and world-leading research activity is: in English and Linguistics 91%, in Art & Design 84%, in History 83%, in Social Work & Social Policy 81% and in Sociology 71%. The Times Higher has described Manchester Met as one of the “big successes outside the traditional research-focused universities”.
In 2012 I was Lynne Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor of British Literature at the University of Connecticut, and in 2008 I spent some time as Visiting Professor in the International Centre at the University of Madras, sponsored by Madras University, Stella Maris College, the Indian Association of British Scholars and the British Council. I have been external examiner for doctoral projects at Granada, Western Australia, Swansea, St Andrews, Roehampton, Edinburgh, Birkbeck, Trinity Dublin and Glasgow, and I have served as professorial advisor on promotion and tenure panels at Brighton, Hull, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, St Andrews, Florida International and Zurich. I am consulting editor for Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and have previously held the same position for the Open Arts Journal. I have membership of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Peer Review College, the AHRC Academic and Strategic Review Colleges, the Strategy Board of the AHRC Northwest Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP) and the AHRC Research Careers and Training Network.
My management responsibilities leave me precious little time for my own personal research. However, my past work, which has always been set on breaking new ground and opening up new subject areas within the field of English Studies, continues to be influential. It was my postdoctoral work that in the 1990s introduced postcolonial theory into Scottish Studies (see Matt McGuire’s Guide to Contemporary Scottish Literature, which covers this work in detail). My book Writing Men (2000), though now admittedly quite out of date, has become something of a classic in the field of literary masculinity studies, and The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) inspired a whole new generation of scholars interested in global writing and the concept of contemporary world literature. More recently I have edited collections of essays for Cambridge and Edinburgh University Presses, as well as a recent volume on the work of Nicola Barker. My current interest is in eco-narratology, with a particular focus on “Arborealism, or Do Novels Do Trees?”
Research outputs
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Books (authored/edited/special issues)
Barker, N., Masters, B., Janes, D.M., Platt, L., Carpenter, G., Kennedy, B., Vardy, C., Marsh, H., Bennett, A., Byrne, E. (2020) Nicola Barker Critical Essays. Gylphi Limited.
Pollard, E., Schoene, B. (2018) British Literature in Transition, 1980–2000: Accelerated Times.
Schoene, B., Schoene-Harwood, B. (2010) The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh.
Schoene, B. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press.
Schoene, B. (2007) The Edinburgh companion to contemporary Scottish literature. Edinburgh University Press.
Schoene, B.J., Lea, D. (2003) Posting the Male. Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature.. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Schoene, B.J. (2000) Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Schoene, B.J. (2000) Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Schoene, B.J. (1995) The Making of Orcadia. Narrative Identity in the Prose Work of George Mackay Brown.. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
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Chapters in books
Pollard, E., Schoene, B.J. (2018) 'No such thing as society: the novel under neoliberalism.' In Pollard, E., Schoene, B.J. (ed.) British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000: Accelerated Times. Cambridge University Press,
Pollard, E., Schoene, B. (2018) 'Introduction.' pp. 1-22.
Schoene, B.J. (2016) 'Twenty-First-Century Fiction.' The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction since 1940. Edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette. pp. 549-63.. Oxford University Press,
Schoene, B.J. (2013) 'Weltliteratur und kosmopolitische Literatur..' In Winko, S., Rippl, G. (ed.) Handbuch Kanon und Wertung. Metzler, pp. 356-363.
Schoene, B.J. (2011) 'Baffled Hopes and Bad Habits: Men, Marriage and Conformity in Queer Theory and Gay Representation.' In Horlacher, S. (ed.) Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209-218.
Schoene, B. (2007) 'Going cosmopolitan: Reconstituting 'Scottishness' in post-devolution criticism.' The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature. pp. 7-16.
Schoene, B. (2006) 'Queer politics, queer theory, and the future of "identity": spiralling out of culture.' In Rooney, E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 283-302.
Schoene, B. (2004) 'Nervous men, mobile nation: masculinity and psychopathology in Irvine Welsh's "Filth" and "Glue".' In Bell, E., Miller, G. (ed.) Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 121-145.
Schoene, B. (2003) 'The Union and Jack: British masculinities, pomophobia and the post-nation.' In Norquay, G., Smyth, G. (ed.) Across the Margins: Identity, Resistance and Minority Culture throughout the British Archipelago. pp. 83-98.
Schoene, B.J. (1997) 'The (Al)location of Culture: Scottish Postcoloniality and the Twentieth-Century Highland Novel..' In Norquay, G., Smyth, G. (ed.) Space and Place: The Geographies of Literature. Liverpool John Moores University Press, pp. 359-371.
Schoene, B.J. (1995) 'Angry Young Masculinity in the Scottish Novels of Alan Sharp..' In Whyte, C. (ed.) Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature.. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 85-106.
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Journal articles
Schoene, B. (2024) 'Coming back down to Earth: the novel and the human condition in the Anthropocene.' English Studies,
Schoene, B. (2024) 'Arboreal obliquity or trees doing the human in Murray Bail's Eucalyptus.' Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,
Schoene, B. (2021) 'Arborealism, or Do Novels Do Trees?.' Textual Practice, 36(9) pp. 1435-1458.
Schoene, B.J. (2017) 'Contemporary American Literature as World Literature: Cruel Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopoetics, and the Search for a Worldlier American Novel.' Anglia: Zeitschrift fuer Englische Philologie, 135(1) pp. 86-104.
Schoene, B.J. (2013) 'The World on a Train. Global Narration in Geoff Ryman's 253 Online Tube Theatre and Print Remix..' Open Arts Journal, 1(1) pp. 7-15.
Schoene, B. (2013) 'Getting World Going in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.' The Senses and Society, 8(1) pp. 96-105.
Schoene, B.J., Byrne, E., Mullaney, J. (2012) 'Barack Obama: Twenty-First-Century President.' Comparative American Stuides, 10(2-3) pp. 109-115.
Schoene, B.J. (2012) 'Cosmo-Kitsch vs. Cosmopoetics.' The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 32(3) pp. 105-113.
Schoene, B. (2010) 'Tour du Monde: David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and the Cosmopolitan Imagination.' COLLEGE LITERATURE, 37(4) pp. 42-+.
Schoene, B. (2008) 'Cosmopolitan Scots.' SCOTTISH STUDIES REVIEW, 9(2) pp. 71-92.
Schoene, B. (2008) 'Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.' MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 54(2) pp. 378-397.
Schoene, B. (2006) 'The wounded woman and the parrot: post-feminist girlhood in Alan Warner's "The Sopranos" and Bella Bathurst's "Special".' Journal of gender studies, 15(2) pp. 133-144.
Schoene, B. (2006) 'The walking cure: Heimat, masculinity and mobile narration in Alan Warner's The man who walks.' SCOTTISH STUDIES REVIEW, 7(1) pp. 95-109.
Lea, D., Schoene, B.J. (2002) 'Introduction to the Special Section on Literary Masculinities.' Men and Masculinities, 4(4) pp. 319-321.
Schoene, B. (1999) 'Beyond (t)race: bildung and proprioception in Meera Syal's 'Anita and Me'.' Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 34(1) pp. 131-148.
Schoene, B. (1999) 'Dams burst: devolving gender in Iain Banks's "The Wasp Factory".' Ariel: review of international English literature, 30(1) pp. 131-148.
Schoene, B. (1998) 'Herald of hybridity: the emancipation of difference in Hanif Kureishi's "The Buddha of Suburbia".' International journal of cultural studies, 1(1) pp. 109-128.
Schoene, B. (1998) 'Emerging as the others of our selves: Scottish multiculturalism and the challenge of body in postcolonial representation.' Scottish Literary Journal, 25(1) pp. 54-72.
Schoene, B.J. (1995) 'I Imagined Nine Centuries: Narrative Fragmentation and Mythical Closure in the Shorter Historical Fiction of George Mackay Brown..' Scottish Literary Journal, 22(2) pp. 41-59.
Schoene, B. (1995) 'A passage to Scotland: Scottish literature and the British postcolonial condition.' Scotlands, 2(1) pp. 107-122.
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Other
Schoene, B. (2015) Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel.
Schoene, B.J. (2014) Foreword: A Queer Affinity.
Schoene, B.J., Byrne, E. (2013) Cosmopolitanism as Critical and Creative Practice. An Introduction..
Schoene, B. (2011) The Anti-Instrumentalist Community.