Role
Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the British Academy.
SNCC's Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (2020) won the C. Hugh Holman Book Award judged by The Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and the American Studies Network Book Prize judged by the European Association of American Studies (EAAS). Published by the University of Georgia in its Print Culture series, it recovers the print and publishing culture of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its activist literary history, notably in writing by Charlie Cobb, Jane Stembridge, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Jean Wheeler Smith, Bill Mahoney, Maria Varela, John O'Neal, James Forman, Gloria House, Worth Long, Peter De Lissovoy, Gloria Wade Gayles, Julius Lester, Richard Hall, Kathleen Collins, Jimmy Garrett, Denise Nicholas, and Mitchell Zimmerman. She talks about it here
In Patterns of Prejudice, historian Ray Arsenault wrote, "the stories that interest Monteith the most do not appear in previous works of scholarship or memoirs; her stories are the largely forgotten ones imbedded in language and literary invention. […] Taken together, this eclectic body of work propels Monteith down an innovative and imaginative road of discovery. Politics and literature, the personal and the collective: it all merges into a new way of understanding SNCC’s deep commitment to participatory democracy and the cultivation and empowerment of local movements. […] Monteith skilfully places SNCC’s print culture in the contexts of Black Power, the Black Arts Movement and the rising conscious[1]ness of postcolonial literature and the international African diaspora.”
For Emilye Crosby in the Journal of American Studies, “ In Monteith’s hands, even writing we know, like Howard Zinn’s The New Abolitionists, reveals new insights…. Thanks to SNCC writers and SNCC’s Stories we now know more of what SNCC did and learned and how they survived to carry on the struggle.”
For Steve Estes in The Sixties, “American Studies researchers and literary scholars will find much to like here... This book successfully marries deep historical research and thoughtful literary criticism in a way that should inspire and inform future works in the field”
Monteith was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to research the broader US civil rights movement's literary histories. She has supervised 42 PhD students to successful completion and welcomes applications from students who wish to pursue their research in any area of her interest and expertise.
Career overview
Before joining Nottingham Trent University, Monteith was Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and founding co-director, with Zoe Trodd, of the Centre for Research in Race and Rights.
From 2013-2016, she was founding Director of the Midlands3Cities-AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (a consortium comprising University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, De Montfort University, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University and put in place multiple creative industry partners). Prior to that, she was Associate Dean of the University of Nottingham Graduate School with responsibility for the Faculty of Arts.
For REF 2014, she was a member and assessor for two subject areas in Sub-Panel D: History and English.
Research areas
Professor Monteith's interdisciplinary research focuses on activism, the American South, the US civil rights movement and massive resistance to civil rights, the 1960s, African-American and Black British history, American literature and culture, feature film, documentary and art cinema, journalism and media cultures, community projects, contemporary fiction and comparative contexts of class, race and ethnicity. The methodologies she deploys include memory studies and memory activism, archival work and oral histories and her current work is on how to address difficult histories and emotions.
She is currently supervising PhD students working on social justice and literature various ways: the decolonisation of YA fiction with focus on First Nations authors in the US and Canada; Black and white women's activism in the East Midlands via practice-led documentary art filmmaking; the literature of the US South, contemporary British fiction; and she has supported a lot of critical-creative practice-led research including a PhD on Nottingham Black Archive and a CDA on how Nottingham Playhouse engages the city's diverse communities. Some examples of previous doctoral projects supervised include the following:
- 2023 Valentina de Riso, Indigenous women's writing in contemporary Canada;
- 2022 Panya Banjoko, The Politics of Poetry: Nottingham Black Archive and African Caribbean Writers and Activist Networks from the 1950s to the 1980s; now Creative Engagement Curator at the National Justice Museum
- 2021 Lauren Eglen, ’The Heart of the Collective’: Freedomways Magazine and Black Women’s Intellectual History, 1930-1985;
- 2021 Bradley Phipps, Motherhood and Manhood: Gender in the White Citizens’ Councils;
- 2020 Scott Weightman, The Outward Face of Massive Resistance: Segregationist Media Strategies in the 1950s and 1960s; now working for UNISON;
- 2019 Tomos Hughes on America’s Imagined Revolution: Narrative and Politics in the Historical Novel of Reconstruction. Key writers examined range from the progressive to the radical: George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances E.W. Harper and W.E.B. Du Bois, now a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow;
- 2018 Katie Hamilton, Reproducing the South, William Faulkner, Pregnancy and the Contemporary Novel (now a barrister)
- 2017 Rosemary Pearce on the emotions history of African Americans enduring racially segregated travel in the US; now Learning Technologist in the Learning and Teaching Support Unit at NTU;
- 2016 Gavan Lennon, the segregated town in the mid twentieth-century southern novel published as Living Jim Crow by Edinburgh University Press in 2020 (Now lecturer at Coventry University;
- 2015 Madalina Stancileaneu on the myth of postracialism and the racial controversies facing Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and first term (now assistant for the Public and Political Affairs Unit, University of Nottingham);
- 2014 Rachel Sykes on The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (Manchester University Press, 2018); now Senior Lecturer in English at University of Birmingham;
- 2013 Nick Witham on U.S. cultural radicalism and the Central America Solidarity Movement, 1979-1992: The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Now Senior Lecturer in American History, University College London and Director of its Institute of the Americas;
- 2012 Francisca Fuentes on the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Jr.; now American Studies Librarian at The Eccles Centre, The British Library;
- 2009 Donna Peberdy on Baby Boomers and ageing in cinema (Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011). Now Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Southampton Solent University;
- 2008 Ceri Gorton on contemporary US writer Kingsolver. Formerly with Arts Council England, and Cultural Development Manager for Oxford City Council, now a freelance creative consultant (Bird and Gorton);
- 2008 James Burton, Cultural Memory, Popular Film, and the Negotiation of the Sixties in Culture Wars Hollywood; Assistant Professor in Communication Arts at Salisbury University, Maryland, USA;
- 2007 Yan Ying on contemporary Chinese and Chinese-American literature. Now Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Leicester;
- 2007 Sinead Moynihan on 21st century fiction, published as Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing (Manchester University Press, 2012). Now Professor in American Literature, University of Exeter;
- 2005 Karen McNally on Frank Sinatra in cinema: When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity published by University of Illinois Press, 2008, reprinted 2015). Now Professor in Film Studies, London Metropolitan University;
- 2005 Champa Patel on Ralph Bunche and Malcolm X's activism in Africa; formerly Director of Programmes for Amnesty International and Head of Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Now, Director of Innovation and Deputy Director of the Future of Conflict programme at International Crisis Group;
Professor Monteith welcomes PhD applications and email enquiries from prospective students in any area that relates to her research interests. Further information may be obtained from the NTU Doctoral School.
External activity
Some examples include:
November 1, 2021 Presentation of SNCC's Stories at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, Emory University, Atlanta
November 25, 2021 Contributor to the British Academy's Thinkers in Our time series Thinkers for our time: W.E.B. Du Bois | The British Academy
Freedom Reads (Summer 2021) at the National Justice Museum organised by Nottingham City of Literature and English PEN
Welcome to the Summer of… | Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature (nottinghamcityofliterature.com)
Professor Monteith’s recent collaborations include:
Nottingham Black Archive for the AHRC World War I Hidden Histories network.
National charity Journey to Justice as city lead to bring its exhibition on US and UK civil rights to the city of Nottingham. The exhibition at the National Justice Museum involved city-wide partnership working with Midlands3Cities, Nottingham City Council, and multiple community and arts organisations, colleges and schools, Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. Alongside the exhibition, local people and university students worked together on human rights initiatives by recovering and reclaiming stories that demonstrate history of rights and justice in Nottingham.
British Academy Landmark Conference on Civil Rights Documentary Cinema: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights This conference was held in memory of American social activist, politician and leader in the civil rights movement Julian Bond (1940-2015) who died suddenly during our collaboration (Monteith on Julian Bond in memoriam for BAAS) It brought together documentary filmmakers, activists, and film, history and media scholars. Its focus was films based in civil rights history and inspired by it to promote a trans-Atlantic research-focused exchange around film production, activist subjects, and the making of civil rights cinema, history and cultural memory. It examined race and rights— activism, massive resistance, film and visual cultures— to intervene creatively in the history of the 1960s and in the historiography of the civil rights movement.BA storytelling and historiography of the civil rights movement Julian Bond: Reflections on the Front Lines(BAAS on BA Event) and Monteith Blog on Bond for BA event Review of the conference
Sponsors and collaborators
Professor Monteith's research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the AHRC, and the British Academy, in the UK and the Rockefeller Foundation and the Centre for the Study of Southern Culture in the US.
She was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow (the only non-US Fellow) on a 5-year project instituted by Kenneth Goings and Barbara Ellen Smith at the University of Memphis, She researched the Mississippi Delta.
In 2017 she was Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi for The Radical South: Southern Activism, Past and Present.
In 2013, she co-organised a conference devoted to hidden histories of individuals at the March on Washington in 1963, held in Washington DC and reviewed here https://blog.notbemoved.com/post/61912784083/memorials-monuments-and-memory/embed
Professor Nahem Yousaf (NTU) and Professor Monteith co-edit the Manchester University Press series Contemporary American and Canadian Writers which publishes the work of established and emerging scholars to reflect the breadth and diversity of contemporary North American writing.
Publications in this series include David Brauner, Philip Roth (2007); Mark Brown, Paul Auster (2007); Andrew Tate, Douglas Coupland (2008); Sinead Moynihan, Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing (2009); David Stirrup, Louise Erdrich (2010); Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons eds. Mark Z. Danielewski (2011); James Peacock, Jonathan Lethem (2011); Andrew Taylor and Simon Malpas, Thomas Pynchon (2013); Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, Helena Wahlström, Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (2014); Cindy Hamilton, Sarah Paretsky (2015), Rachel Sykes, The Quiet American Novel (2018), Zalfa Feghali, Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice and Contemporary American and Canadian Literature (2019), Lydia Cooper, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature (2021) Michael Kalisch, The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction. (2021), Rachel Sykes et al, eds. Marilynne Robinson (2022)
Please address emails about proposals for new titles to both editors.
Press expertise
- Cultural activism US and UK
- The American South
- The U.S. civil rights movement
- recovering hidden histories
- The politics of emotion
- Memory studies
- American literature, journalism, film and media
- 1960s
- Race, rights and social justice in a variety of national and international contexts
- The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
- Documentary cinema
- Literary and cultural history from the nineteenth century to the present
- Critical-creative practice and community projects
- Memory studies
- Contemporary fiction, US, UK and comparative perspectives
- Heritage and cultural industries