Dr James Purdon

Dr James Purdon

Senior Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2647
Email
jjp5@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 10
Location
Castle House

 

Biography

James Purdon studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was a Herchel Smith scholar at Harvard, and worked as a parliamentary reporter before completing his doctorate in 2012. After three years as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, he joined the School of English as a Lecturer in 2015 and was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in 2022. His writing has appeared in scholarly journals including Essays in Criticism, Modernist Cultures, and the Review of English Studies, as well as mass-market publications including The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, and Apollo.

Research areas

James researches the intersections of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary narrative with technology, media, and politics, and he has particular interests in modernist studies, Cold War-era culture, contemporary fiction, and the visual arts. His first book — Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2016) — showed how new forms of surveillance and data-gathering by states influenced fiction and film at the birth of the information age, with a particular focus on figures such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, John Sommerfield, and John Grierson.

His other books include The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (Penn State University Press, 2021 – co-edited with Rex Ferguson and Melissa M. Littlefield), which focuses on the relationship between modern forms of identity and the media in which those forms are created and verified; British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920: A New Age? (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which surveys literary culture in Britain and the British Empire in the early years of the twentieth century; and Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which collects a series of essays designed to reintroduce and revivify the work of a major twentieth-century Scottish writer.

With David Trotter and Steven Connor, James edits the open-access book series Technographies (Open Humanities Press), which publishes new and innovative scholarship at the intersection of writing and technology.

PhD supervision

  • Sandro Eich
  • Dong Xia
  • Christopher O'Hara
  • Kathryn Bruce

Selected publications

  • Introduction

     Purdon, J., 1 Mar 2023, Naomi Mitchison: a writer in time. Purdon, J. (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 14 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

  • Mitchison, decolonisation and African modernity

     Purdon, J., 1 Mar 2023, Naomi Mitchison: a writer in time. Purdon, J. (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 135-148 14 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

  • Naomi Mitchison: a writer in time

     Purdon, J. (ed.), 1 Mar 2023, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 174 p.

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

  • Naomi Mitchison's 'Europe'

     Purdon, J., 1 Mar 2023, Naomi Mitchison: a writer in time. Purdon, J. (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 149-153 6 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

  • Open access

    Mediating non-persons: on Daniel Heller-Roazen's Absentees

     Purdon, J., 12 Dec 2022, In: Critical Analysis of Law. 9, 2, 9 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article

  • Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature

     Purdon, J., May 2021, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Comparative Critical Studies. 18, 1, p. 117-121 5 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review

  • Identity noir

     Purdon, J., 13 Aug 2021, The art of identification: forensics, surveillance, identity. Ferguson, R., Littlefield, M. M. & Purdon, J. (eds.). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 49-64 16 p. (AnthropoScene: the SLSA book series; vol. 9).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Introduction

     Ferguson, R., Littlefield, M. M. & Purdon, J., 13 Aug 2021, The art of identification: forensics, surveillance, identity. Ferguson, R., Littlefield, M. M. & Purdon, J. (eds.). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 1-20 20 p. (AnthropoScene: the SLSA book series; vol. 9).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

  • Rose Macaulay and propaganda

     Purdon, J., 1 Dec 2021, In: Modernist Cultures. 16, 4, p. 449-468 20 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • The art of identification: forensics, surveillance, identity

     Ferguson, R. (ed.), Littlefield, M. (ed.) & Purdon, J. (ed.), 13 Aug 2021, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 262 p. (AnthropoScene: the SLSA book series; vol. 9)

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

 

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