Berthold Schoene

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?”

Get in touch

0161 247 1780
428 Geoffrey Manton Building
By appoinment

Research outputs