DrMaria Stuart

Early teaching was in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. In the late 1990s I introduced the first course on African American Literature to the college and concepts of race and ethnicity have been at the centre of my teaching since, both on postgraduate courses on nineteenth-century literature and as part of undergraduate teaching on American Modernism. In 2008 I initiated a new course on the history of detective fiction, and subsequently convened a co-taught course on contemporary crime fiction, the latter combining critical/theoretical readings of the genre and the practice-based approach of colleagues in Creative Writing. Both courses form the foundation of a new disciplinary field within the School, one encouraging student engagement across critical and creative practice. Recent innovations in teaching content and practice have been stimulated by collaborations with colleagues on team-taught courses. These have both enabled me to bring research to the foreground of teaching (lectures on disability and dysfluency studies for Critical Theory) and have prompted me to expand my own horizons in response to recent innovations within our discipline (introducing students to the concept of decolonising the curriculum through collaborative teaching on Reading World Literature.) A new co-taught course on The Global Nineteenth Century incorporates new directions within Nineteenth-Century Studies, reorienting the field emphatically towards colonialism, transnationalism, and the interconnected hierarchies of race, class and gender that underscore these texts.

Present teaching includes:
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Critical Theory
Detecting Fictions: the Crime Novel in Britain, America and Ireland
Modern American Literature
The Global Nineteenth Century
Ugly Feelings