Picture of Jess Edwards

Professor Jesse Richard Edwards

Head of English

My profile

Biography

I have a BA in English and an MA in Anglo-American Literary Relations from University College London. I completed my doctorate in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex in 1997. I started my first full-time academic job as a Lecturer at London Metropolitan University in 1999 and took up a post as a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Met in 2004. I’ve been Head of the Department of English since 2011.

Interests and expertise

My main areas of interest are both the literary aspects of geography and the geographic aspects of literature. My Phd and early published research was concerned with the early modern period when a recognisably ‘modern’ cartography first emerged. My first book dealt with seventeenth-century discourses on geometry, mapping and surveying, and work up to around 2014 explored contributions to seventeenth and early eighteenth-century geographic culture by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Daniel Defoe. But I’m also interested in twentieth and twenty-first century travel, place and nature writing, and in what might broadly be described as the public life of literature. I’ve published on the place of poetry within the school curriculum and on the uses of literary sense of place in UK landscape policy.

Get in touch

0161 247 6167
215 Geoffrey Manton Building

Impact

In 2016/17 I worked with partners at University of Manchester and Manchester City Council on a bid for Manchester to join the UNESCO Creative Cities network as the UK’s fourth City of Literature. Since the designation was awarded in October 2017 I have continued to work with these partners to establish the independent organisation which now runs Manchester City of Literature (MCoL), and to establish the partnership network of libraries, publishers, cultural policymakers, etc. through which its projects are being delivered. Manchester’s designation has expedited the growth of publishing in our City to make it second only to London as a hub for this key creative industry, grown and diversified audiences for cultural activity within the city, supported education and social cohesion, brought literary activity to the centre of cultural policymaking and raised awareness of the city as a destination for literary tourism.

Over the same period I have also worked on the development and launch of the UK’s fourth public poetry library, and the only one to be based in a University or in the Northwest. Beyond the enhancement of research and education in English and Creative Writing, Manchester Poetry Library aims to generate opportunities for research and impact across subjects including Linguistics, Librarianship, Education and Health, and opportunities for Educational projects in as diverse a range of disciplines, both on and off the curriculum.

Research outputs

Jess Edwards, Noor Mohammed, Caitlin Nunn and Paul Gray, ‘Mother Tongue Other Tongue: Nine Years of Creative Multilingualism in Practice’, English in Education, 56:1 (2022), 18-30, DOI: 10.1080/04250494.2020.1850176.

‘Literature and Sense of Place in UK Landscape Strategy’, Landscape Research, 44.6 (2019), 659-670. DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2018.1518519.

‘“The Land to Forget Time’: Tourism, Caving and Writing in the Derbyshire White Peak’, Landscape Research, 42.6 (2017), 634-649, DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2017.1316836.

‘Defoe’s Global Geography in Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis’, Kit Kincade, Katherine Ellison and Holly Faith Nelson (eds), Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (New York: AMS Press, 2014), 141-166.