Max Saunders - Biography#

Following a Research Fellowship and then College Lectureship at Selwyn, his academic career has been spent at King’s College London, from 1989 - 2019, and subsequently the University of Birmingham.

Teaching Expertise

He has taught a wide variety of topics, from Early Modern to postmodern texts; from modern theatre to comparative literature; from literature and impressionism to Existentialism; and from life writing to war literature. He has always taught students at all levels, with an above-average number of MA and PhD students. Course evaluation feedback from students has been consistently highly appreciative, especially of the innovative design of courses introducing unfamiliar but rewarding books.

Research and Esteem

His research gives Prof. Saunders authority across an unusual range: not just literary criticism and literary history, but also life-writing practice and theory; poetics; textual editing; cultural history and criticism; literature and the visual arts; and more recently, literature and science, futurology and digital humanities. Literary research in Modern Literature has always been at the heart of his scholarly work, and has resulted in five substantial books (four over 500pp each, the fifth over 400pp), plus numerous editions, articles and chapters

His research has focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and in particular on modernism, modernity, Impressionism, and the visual arts. The two volumes of the critical biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP) appeared in 1996. This was followed by the monograph on Life writing theory, Self Impression (OUP 2010). More recently he worked on the futurological imagination, in Imagined Futures (OUP 2019), and the new series FUTURES.