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Steven Connor
British literary scholar From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Steven Kevin Connor, FBA (born 11 February 1955) is a British scholar of literature, language and culture. He was formerly the Academic Director of the London Consortium, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is currently Director of Research in the Digital Futures Institute, King's College, London.
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Early life and education
Connor was born on 11 February 1955 in Chichester, in Sussex, England.[1] From 1966 to 1973, he was educated at Christ's Hospital and Bognor Regis School. In 1973, he matriculated into Wadham College, Oxford to study English; his tutor was Terry Eagleton.[2][3] He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1976.[1] He remained at Oxford to study for a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in English.[3] He completed his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis titled "Prose fantasy and myth-criticism 1880–1900".[4] Though he never published his thesis in book form, all of the work that has followed it may be seen as concerned with the operations of fantasy.
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Academic career
In 1979 or 1980, Connor joined Birkbeck College, University of London, as a lecturer in English.[1][3][5] He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1990, made Reader in Modern English Literature in 1991, and appointed Professor of Modern Literature and Theory in 1994.[5] He held two senior positions at the college: he was Pro-Vice-Master for International and Research Students between 1998 and 2001; and College Orator between 2001 and 2012.[6] From 2002 to 2012, he additionally served as Academic Director of the London Consortium, a graduate school of the University of London that specialised in multidisciplinary programs.[2]
In October 2012, Connor was appointed as Grace 2 Professor of English in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.[3][5] He was also elected a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.[1][7]
In 2023 he became Director of Research in the Digital Futures Institute, King's College, London.
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Personal life
In 1984, Connor married Lindsey Richardson. Together they had one daughter. They divorced in 1988. In 2005, Connor married Lynda Nead. Together they have two sons.[1] Nead is an art historian and academic.[8]
Honours
In 2012, Connor was elected an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London.[9] In July 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[10]
Selected works
Books
- Charles Dickens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
- Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
- Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (1989) 2nd, revised and enlarged edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
- Theory and Cultural Value (1992)
- The English Novel in History 1950–1995 (1995)
- James Joyce (Exeter: Northcote House, 1996)
- Dumbstruck – A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000)
- The Book of Skin (2003)
- Fly (London: Reaktion, 2006)
- The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010)
- Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011)
- A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011)
- Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014)
- Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
- Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion, 2016)
- Dream Machines (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017)
- The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (London: Reaktion, 2019)
- Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
- A History of Asking (London: Open Humanities Press, 2023)
- Dreamwork: Why All Work Is Imaginary (London: Reaktion, 2023)
- Styles of Seriousness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023)
- Gaston Bachelard: An Intellectual Biography (London: Reaktion, 2025)
Edited Books
- Samuel Beckett’s `Waiting for Godot’ and `Endgame': A New Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1994)
- Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1996)
- Charles Dickens (London: Longman ‘Critical Readers’, 1996).
- (with Daniela Caselli and Laura Salisbury) Other Becketts (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002)
- The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
- Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Faber, 2010)
Essays 2020-present
- ‘In Public’, in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 51-61.
- ‘Admiring the Nothing of It: Shakespeare and the Senseless’, in Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, ed. Simon Smith (London: Bloomsbury 2020), pp. 40-61.
- ‘Datelines’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mathematics and Literature, ed. Alice Jenkins, Robert Tubbs and Nina Engelhardt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 513-28.
- ‘Scaphander’, in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley (London: Reaktion, 2021), pp. 277-9.
- ‘Terry Eagleton’s Divine Comedy‘, Theory Now, 5 (2022), 82-98.
- ‘Consorting‘, Critical Quarterly, 64 (2022), 14-19.
- ‘Asphyxiations’, SubStance, 52 (2023), 74-8.
- 'Afterword', in Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 309-14.
- 'Michel Serres and Glory', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 29 (2024), 127-36.
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References
External links
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