Professor Carl Plasa

Biography

I am currently a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff, having worked previously at the Universities of Manchester and Cork.

Publications

Teaching

My current teaching portfolio includes first-year lectures on Transforming Visions: Text and Image, together with a second-year module on African American literature from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison and a third-year module on literary representations of Caribbean slavery from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. I also teach an MA option titled Postcolonial Brontë.

As noted on the "Overview" page, I am currently researching a book examining the literary legacies of Pre-Raphaelitism from 1932 to the present day. These legacies revolve in large measure around the figure of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-62), who rose from working in a dressmaker and milliner’s shop to become the muse, mistress and (eventually, if briefly) wife to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As well as also being an artist and poet in her own right, Siddal was the model for two of the Pre-Raphaelites’ most famous and enduring paintings, John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2) and Rossetti’s own Beata Beatrix (1864-70). She had the further distinction of being exhumed by her widower, some seven years after her death from a laudanum overdose, in order for him to retrieve the manuscript of his poems that he had buried with her in Highgate Cemetery’s Grave No. 5779. How have Siddal’s remarkable life and the even more remarkable aftermath to her demise, along with the paintings already adduced, been remembered and refashioned in biographical, fictional and poetic texts produced over the ninety-year period which this book encompasses?

While this question provides the critical focus for the five chapters that constitute the book’s first Part, the spotlight turns, in the final three chapters making up Part Two, to other aspects of the Pre-Raphaelites’ literary afterlife, examining work which sidesteps Siddal’s haunting presence all but entirely and thus complements the material covered earlier. Although notable examples of such work are in evidence since at least the late 1970s, they have become increasingly frequent in the last decade or so and it is on the literature of this era that Part Two accordingly concentrates, with each chapter devoted to one particular question. How has the artistic and amatory  entanglement between Millais, John Ruskin and Ruskin’s wife, Euphemia Chalmers Gray, been reimagined in contemporary fiction? How has such fiction additionally both critiqued the Pre-Raphaelite fetishization of women’s hair and exploited it as a narrative resource? How have contemporary poets engaged with Pre-Raphaelite paintings for which Siddal was not the model?

Research interests

• Pre-Raphaelitism and its literary legacies
• Literary and visual representations of slavery
• African American literature 
• Caribbean literature
• Victorian literature

Supervision

I would welcome applications from students working in any of my main research areas:

• Pre-Raphaelitism and its literary legacies
• Literary and visual representations of slavery
• Ekphrastic literature
• African American literature 
• Victorian literature (particularly Charlotte Brontë and Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

I am currently supervising the following doctoral students:

Morgan Lee, researching spectrality in Tennyson's poetry, with particular reference to forms of literary and cultural memory:

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/research-students/view/2611373-

Gareth Smith, "Class, Culture and Citizenship: Queer Literature In Post-War Britain" (co-supervision with Professor Irene Morra, University of Toronto)

Joanne Rush (co-supervision with Professor Gerard Woodward at Bath Spa University): “(Re)constructing Historical Paintings: an exploration of the affective possibilities and veridical implications of notional portraiture in neo-historical fiction” (AHRC-funded Creative Writing thesis).

Past projects

I have supervised the successful completion of some fourteen PhDs to date, across a wide array of topics ranging from the Harlem Renaissance to Richard Wright and from Dickens and empire to Wordsworthian legacies in Victorian poetry. Details are given below:

2016: Caleb Sivyer, “The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter” (finishing supervisor)

2014: Jayne Thomas, “From Allusion to Intertext: Reading Wordsworth in Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins”

2014: Mohamed Maaloum, “The Loss of the Referent: Identity and Fragmentation in Richard Wright’s Fiction”

2013: Phillip Roberts, “Cinema and Control” (finishing supervisor)

2013: Theresa Wray, “A Reappraisal of the Short Stories of Mary Lavin” (finishing supervisor)

2011: Anthony Austin, “‘The Great Dread of Our Age’: Reading Alzheimer’s and the Gothic”

2009: Renée Chow, “Postcolonial Hauntologies: Creole Identity in Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen”

2008: Jodie Matthews, “Reading the Victorian Gypsy”

2004: Dale Duddridge, “‘Ein Anderer Schauplatz’: Theatrical Visions in Freudian Psychoanalysis”

2002: Sean Purchase, “Dickens’s Silent Empire”

2001: Adam Woodruff, “Walter Benjamin and Modernism: Towards a Poetics of Urban Representation”

1999: Tiffany Atkinson (currently Professor of Creative Writing, University of East Anglia), “The Dissenting Flesh: Corporeality, Representation and Theory”

1998: Simon Lee-Price, “Racial Hybridity and the Harlem Renaissance: History, Literature, Theory”

1996: Alan Grossman, “‘Things Welsh’: Identities on the March(es)”