Role
Dr Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Writing. She teaches on the BA English, BA Creative Writing, MA Creative Writing and MRes English Literary Research programmes, and supervises PhD students working in contemporary literature and creative writing. An award-winning poet and academic, Sarah publishes widely on 20th and 21st century literature, literary theory and creative-critical ecologies. She leads the Critical Poetics Research Group, an interdisciplinary research group exploring creative and critical practice.
Research areas
Dr Sarah Jackson specialises in contemporary literature and theory, and is particularly interested in exploring the intersections between creative and critical writing. A BBC New Generation Thinker (2016), NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017), AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018-2020) and the recipient of an AHRC grant for impact and engagement (2023-2024), Sarah's publications include Pelt (Bloodaxe 2012), which won the Seamus Heaney Prize; Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Unidentifiable Literary Objects, a special issue of parallax (2019) co-edited with Camilla Bostock; and Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (Bloomsbury 2023). She is currently undertaking AHRC-funded research entitled Voice Notes: Creativity, Technology and Exile.
Her animation, 'Calling Across Borders', produced in collaboration with Compass Collective, was shortlisted for Best Research Film in the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2021, and she regularly presents her writing and research on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.
Sarah welcomes research proposals from prospective MPhil/DPhil students working in any of the following areas:
- creative and critical writing
- 20th and 21st-century literature
- contemporary poetry
- ecopoetics
- writing and technology
- deconstruction
Current doctoral projects supervised:
- Victoria Callus, Paper Cuts: Investigating Paper Affect in Contemporary Experimental Literature
- Helena Hunter, Algae Ecologies: Multiple Scales, Temporalities and Perspectives
- Lucy Grace, Stories in Stones: Mines, Memory and the Geological Imagination
- Olivia Foster, Cohabiting with the Environment: An Ecocritical Examination of Sylvia Plath and Audre Lorde
Doctoral students supervised to completion:
- Zayneb Allak, Spider Poetics: Writing the Uncanny
- Lynda Clark, 'That's Not How It Should End': The Effects of Reader/Player Responses on the Development of Narrative
- Hannah Cooper-Smithson, Patterns in Nature: The Use of Poetic Form in Contemporary Ecopoetry
- Rebecca Cullen, Mastering Time: Time and Temporality in Contemporary Poetry
- Joanne Dixon, Fitting Manifestations: Epiphany in the work of Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie and Liz Berry
- Jean Morris, Promised Lands: A Psycho-Social Account of Statelessness
- Iain Spillman, The Flashing and Fading of Consciousness in Perception': The Fictional Freud in Literature and Theory
- Alyson Stoneman, Contemporary Poetry, Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding
- Lauren Terry, Museums of Memory: Modernist Poetics, Psychoanalysis, and the Material Object
Further information may be obtained from the NTU Doctoral School.
External activity
- AHRC Peer Review College (2020 - ongoing)
- AHRC Follow-On Funding for Impact and Engagement (2023-2024)
- External Examiner MA Creative and Critical Writing, University of Sussex (2019-2023)
- AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018-2020)
- Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature Collaborative Board (2017-)
- NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017)
- BBC AHRC New Generation Thinker (2016)
- External Examiner MSc Creative Writing, Edinburgh University (2014-2018)
- External Examiner BA Creative Writing, Birkbeck (University of London) (2013-2017)
- External Examiner BA English and Creative Writing, Birmingham University (2011-2015)
Recent partners include:
- BT Archives and Heritage
- Compass Collective
- Counterpoints Arts
- New Art Exchange
- Nottingham Contemporary
- Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature
- Refugee Roots
- Science Museum
- Slemani UNESCO City of Literature
- STEP
Publications
Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place, Jackson, S, 2023, Bloomsbury
Critical Poetics: Writing with Care, Jackson, S, and L Kemp (eds), 2022, special issue of The Contemporary Journal
Calling without Calling: Barghouti, Derrida and 'The International Day of Telephones', Jackson, S, 2021, Textual Practice 36.9
Touching, Jackson S, 2020, in A Pettinger and T Youngs (eds), Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, Routledge
Between Calls: Together in the Garden, Jackson, S and C Bostock, 2019, parallax, 25.3
In Transit: Poems of Travel. Jackson, S, and Youngs, T, Birmingham, Emma Press, 2018
Derrida on the Line. Jackson, S, Derrida Today, 2017, 10 (2), 142-59
Echolocation. Jackson, S, Adda Stories. 2017.
Ten Poems on the Telephone. Jackson, S, Nottingham, Candlestick Press, 2017
A Conversion Disorder. Jackson, S, Oxford Literary Review, 2015, 37 (2), 217-42
Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing. Jackson S, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015
Pelt. Jackson S, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2012
So Close: Writing that Touches. Jackson S, The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2012, 9 (3), 408-18
Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos. Jackson S, Oxford Literary Review, 2011, 33 (2), 167-187
Touching Freud's Dog: H.D.'s Tactile Poetics. Jackson S, Angelaki, 2010, 15 (2), 187-201
Milk. Jackson S, Brighton, Pighog Press, 2008
Press expertise
Dr Jackson is an AHRC Leadership Fellow and BBC AHRC New Generation Thinker. She can offer comment on literature, culture, technology, and the environment, contemporary poetry and psychoanalysis.