Staff Members and Research

Other members of the Centre from Manchester Metropolitan’s English Department include:

• The novelist Sarah Butler (Lecturer in Creative Writing), who established the Urban Words literature consultancy (that explores the relationship between writing and place through prose, poetry and participatory projects)
• Dr Nicola Bishop (Senior Lecturer) whose work on cultural constructions of place on screen and in literature explores multiple sites
• Dr Nikolai Duffy (Senior Lecturer & Deputy Head of the Postgraduate arts and Humanities Centre) who is currently exploring hybridised creative and critical approaches to place
• Dr Paul Evans (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing) renowned nature writer, Guardian columnist and radio broadcaster
• Dr Jess Edwards (Head of the Department of English) whose research and publications examine literature, cartography and space, as well as the relationship between landscape and contemporary creativity
• Andrew Michael Hurley (Lecturer in Creative Writing) a multi-award winning author whose novels strongly evoke the spirit of place
• Novelist Gregory Norminton (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing)
• Dr Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing) who won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014 and the Windham-Campell Prize for Fiction 2018
• Renowned novelist Gregory Norminton (Lecturer in creative writing)
• Anjum Malik (Lecturer in Creative Writing) a multidisciplinary writer working in film, poetry and drama, whose community engaged practise involves working with asylum seekers and refugees with a focus on place
• Dr Helen Mort (Lecturer in Creative Writing) whose poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction are all informed by a preoccupation with place, landscape and the body
• Professor Jean Sprackland (Professor of Creative Writing) winner of the Costa Poetry Award and the Portico Prize for Non-Fiction
• Professor Antony Rowland (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Head of the Centre for Creative Writing, English Literature and Linguistics) whose recent poetry collections explore Manchester
• Professor Minoli Salgado (Professor of International Writing) whose academic and literary work explores transnational imaginaries, specifically in relation to traumatic histories and sites of exceptional violence
• Professor Berthold Schoene (Professor of English and Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange, Faculty of Arts and Humanities) whose influential scholarly publications on the cosmopolitan novel have revived new interest in global literature
• Dr Paul Wake (Reader)

In 2019 we were delighted to welcome our first ever Visiting Professor, Tim Cresswell (Ogilvie Chair in Geography, University of Edinburgh) to the Centre. Tim is a geographer, poet, author and editor of over a dozen books on themes of place.

The Centre for Place Writing is a creative-critical research and knowledge exchange centre dedicated to exploring place and its many meanings. Although the Centre is rooted within the Department of English, interdisciplinarity is integral to our vision and to this aim the Centre brings together a research cluster of Associate Members from various departments and disciplines at Manchester Met including:

• Dr Becky Alexis-Martin (Lecturer in Human Geography)
• Dr Richard Brook (Reader in Architecture)
• Dr Luca Csepely-Knorr (Reader in Architecture)
• Professor Tim Edensor (Professor of Social & Cultural Geography, Institute of Place Management)
• Dr Sam Edwards (Senior Lecturer & Head of History)
• Dr Shirin Hirsch (historian in residence at the People’s History Museum and Lecturer in History)
• Dr Timothy Jung (Director of Augmented and Virtual Reality Hub)
• Professor Gideon Koppel (Professor of Media)
• Professor Kate Pahl (Professor of Arts and Literacy, Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Head of ESRI)
• Professor Richard Preziosi (Director of Ecology and Environmental Research Centre)
• Dr Tina Richardson (Senior lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, Manchester Fashion Institute)
• Professor Heather Shore (Director of the Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage)

We are affiliated with colleagues from a wide range of other universities both nationally and internationally including:

• ​Dr Robert Macfarlane, Reader in Literature and the Environmental Humanities, Faculty of English, Cambridge
• Associate Professor Sukhdev Sandhu at The Centre for Experimental Humanities, Faculty of English, at New York University
• Dr Eleonora Rao (Associate Lecturer), Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università Degli Studi di Salerno (Italy)
• Dr Anders Skare Malvik (Associate Lecturer), Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim (NTNU)
• Dr Nadia Valman, Reader in English Literature, Co-director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, Queen Mary University of London
• The English Department of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus Barbados who we hope to collaborate with a planned Summer School on place writing in 2021
• Professor Susan Oliver, Deputy Dean (research) (Humanities) and Professor Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
• Dr James Canton, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
• Iain Sinclair, Distinguished Writer in Residence, School of Literature and Languages, the University of Surrey

The Centre has worked with multiple organisations in Manchester (such as The Portico Library, Victoria Baths and the International Antony Burgess Foundation) and nationally or members have collaborated with many other institutions and organisations (including, for example, Metal Culture, Arts Council England, the National Maritime Museum, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the British Library).