Dr Annabel Williams

Dr Annabel Williams

Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2316
Email
alw32@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

I am a literary scholar and cultural historian with specialisms in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in English. I received my BA from the University of Bristol, my MSt from Lincoln College, Oxford, and my DPhil from Merton College, Oxford.

In 2020, I was awarded a Library Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), Edinburgh, for my project on science and magical thinking in the work of the writer Arthur Koestler. This was followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship, also at IASH, for a curatorial project on the early life and Edinburgh home of the writer Rebecca West. Prior to joining St Andrews in 2025, I was a lecturer in Modernist Literatures at Queen's University Belfast. I have  also taught at the University of Durham, King's College London, and Mansfield College and Balliol College, Oxford.

Research areas

My research interests traverse modernist and mid-century literature and culture, especially in areas of travel, war writing, political writing, and the relationship between literature and place. My first monograph, Travel, War and Home in Late Modernist British Literature, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. It explores the literary pursuit and definition of home by late modernists amid geopolitical upheaval, with a focus on the work of W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Rebecca West. Chapters consider areas including topophilia (the love of place) and its relation to nationalism; hospitality; cosmopolitanism; and militourism.

Another area of my research looks at the entanglements of ideology and scientific culture in twentieth-century fiction. I am particularly interested in remote technologies, magical thinking, pseudoscience and edgelands. I am in the early stages of writing a book on some of this in relation to the British-Hungarian writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler.

My recent chapter on telephone operators, switchboards and phoneys appeared in the book I co-edited with Sarah Jackson and Philip Leonard – Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory (EUP, 2026). Telepoetics is the first edited collection to connect literature to the telephone and its networks from the period of the telephone's invention to the present day.

PhD supervision

  • Valery Goutorova

Selected publications

 

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