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https://webcdn.mmu.ac.uk/profiles/img/profile-images/Kate-McGowan-resize-100x100-5305e17e78c37.jpg
Three Ways to Describe Me: considered, excited by new ideas, always learning.
In my spare time I love exploring the Peak District and getting covered in mud alongside dog (who is a little rascal!). I come from the South of England and am addicted to snorkelling, surfing and power boating whenever I can get back there.
Foundation Year Approaches to English
Critical and Cultural Theory
Approaches to Narrative
Do it! Throw yourself into it and see what comes out the other end. As long as you’re prepared to read hard and analyse carefully, you’ll love it too!
Lectures have a place, but I’m much happier with active engagement with my students.
Seminars start with questions and I encourage students to say what they are thinking as well as to ask questions themselves. This means that students set the agenda and from there we go into complex critical ideas. I firmly believe that our students are capable of amazing things, so I never dumb things down. You’re required to read difficult material, and I don’t expect you to get it first time around. I will, however, spend as long as it takes to support all students in finding ways into the texts we study and in developing ways of thinking that open up exciting possibilities for them.
B.A. English Literature, University of Wales at Cardiff, PhD Contemporary Critical Theory, University of Wales at Cardiff.
I joined the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1990, having taught previously at the Universities of Illinois and New York in the USA, and Exeter in the UK. I am currently an executive Director of The English Association and serve on both the Executive and Publications Committees of that organization. Since joining Manchester Metropolitan University, I have also spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.
I’m passionate about teaching Critical Theory at MMU because our students are exciting thinkers who push the boundaries of ideas. They surprise me with new ways of thinking every year. Critical theory is about complex ideas, which question what we all take for granted in everyday life. It challenges common sense and requires us to think again about values and assumptions we didn’t even know we held. It encourages us to engage with the world – of politics, culture and all manner of futures yet to be anticipated. I love it because it makes my brain do somersaults and it’s never easy or obvious.
My main responsibilities within the Department are largely in teaching Critical and Cultural Theory with an emphasis on contemporary strands of poststructuralism. Special areas of interest include: modernism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the concept of the inhuman.
My main responsibilities within the Department are largely in teaching Critical and Cultural Theory with an emphasis on contemporary strands of poststructuralism. Special areas of interest include: modernism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the concept of the inhuman.
As well as being the Programme Leader for the MA Critical Theory I also teach the Core Module “Sign, Subject, Text.” I have supervised a diverse range of PhD theses, from Rave Music and the New Dance Culture, AIDS Representation in Art and Literature, Media and Propaganda, through Cinema and Documentary Forms. I am currently the Director of Studies for PhDs in Derrida and Buddhism, Biological Essentialism and theories of gender, and Derrida and Jouissance.
My own research is currently focussed on conceptual questions of the inhuman as well as its representation in popular media, film, literature and contemporary cultural discourse. However, I have written on subjects as diverse as Queer Cinema and Theory, Aboriginal Writing and National Cultures, Deconstruction and Postmodernism, Virginia Woolf and the English poet John Milton.
I have published two editions of A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, and a monograph entitled Key Issues in Critical and Cultural Theory. I have also edited 7 Volumes of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.
“Worlds of Scents and Sensibility” with Shafqat Nasir. Times Higher Education Supplement. 25th May 2007
“Reports from the battle for meaning.” Times Higher Education Supplement. 27th May 2005
“Oedipal Androids: desire and the human in the third millennium.” Technoetic Arts. Volume 4.1 (2006)
“Structuralism and Semiotics.” The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)
“Deconstruction and Postmodernism” with Simon Malpas in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 9. (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2001)
“Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 3. Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 1996)
“Gloria Anzaldúa.” The A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. (Harvester Press:Brighton, 1996)
“Virginia Woolf.” The A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. (Harvester Press:Brighton, 1996)
“¿Y ahora...qué es esto del ‘Queer’?” Mas Alla De La Bella (in)Differencia. Publicaceones Puertoriqueñas: San Juan, 1996).
Member, Executive Committee of the English Association