About

Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature in the Department of English & Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is actively involved with Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature. Her research focuses on the utopian imagination in contemporary literature, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and Western Marxism. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines temporal experience and utopian anticipation in contemporary texts by British writers including Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Marina Warner, Sam Taylor, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, Patrick Ness and Claire Fuller. Her work on contemporary writers has also led to two co-edited books: China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015).

Caroline is currently working on her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe, which examines strangely hopeful moments of inhuman collaboration within the elemental contexts of the lithic, the mycological, the arboreal, and the hydrological. Focusing on novels, films, TV series, artworks, and sculpture primarily produced since 2010, the book explores works such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer’s weird fiction, Wangechi Mutu’s multimedia artworks, J. G. Ballard’s ecocatastrophe fictions, Jason de Caires Taylor’s underwater sculptures, Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic cinema, Tade Thompson’s mycopunk, and Seana Gavin’s fungal collages.

Her other main project at the moment is editing The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-2020 (forthcoming in 2022).

Caroline has written a number of journal articles for publications such as Telos, Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Contemporary Literature, ASAP: Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the New Statesman. Her book chapter contributions on science and utopian fiction and contemporary literature include chapters for The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1980 to the Present (ed. Peter Boxall), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, 2nd edition (ed. Niall Harrison, Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James), Science Fiction: A Literary History (ed. Roger Luckhurst, for the British Library Press), The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Fiction (ed. Robert Eaglestone and Daniel O’Gorman) and the Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature (ed. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Fátima Vieira and Peter Marks).

In addition to her public engagement work, Caroline has also been invited to lecture at a number of academic and public institutions, including Harvard University, the European Commission in Brussels, the LSE, King’s College London, the National Library of Sweden, Princeton University, the University of Durham, the Academy of the Fine Arts in Vienna, UCL, the University of Cardiff, the Royal Irish Academy, SOAS, the University of Warwick, the Literary London Society, the British Library, Queen Mary, University of London, and the Institute of English Studies. She has given media interviews for the BBC, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Times Higher Education, the Austrian national broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) and the Guardian. She is regularly involved in public speaking and has been invited to share her research in events at the Wellcome Trust, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, Hillingdon Literary Festival, the Museum of London, BBC One South East, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the LSE Literary Festival. 

Caroline is known for her advocacy in open access publishing. She is Founding and Commissioning Editor of the open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium, and is Co-Founder (with Prof. Martin Eve) of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) – a leading open access publishing platform for humanities journals, which is also working with numerous international partners including: Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Open Book Publishers, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Public Knowledge Project, the Wellcome Trust, the British Library, the Creative Commons, RCUK, Jisc Collections, and the Modern Languages Association. 

Caroline supervises several PhD research students working on contemporary literature and science fiction, as well as digital humanities, projects. She welcomes PhD applications on the following topics: 21st-century literature, utopian and dystopian narratives, science fiction (particularly feminist SF, ecocatastrophe narratives, the New Weird, and contemporary slipstream), apocalyptic literature and culture, literary and critical theory, Western Marxism and the philosophy of the Frankfurt School.

Caroline is Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature and runs the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture. She joined Birkbeck in September 2013, having previously worked as Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln (2011-2013), Tutor in English Literature at the University of Surrey (2010-2011) and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Nottingham (2008). She was made a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in 2016 and has recently been elected as Secretary of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS).

Contact details:
Email: caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)20 3073 8405
Twitter: @the_blochian