Dr Brian Jarvis

  • Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film

Research groups and centres

Publications

Academic Career

  • Loughborough University (1991- )
  • Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship in 20th-Century American Literature, Harry Ransom Centre for the Humanities, University of Texas (2024)
  • Director of Doctoral Programmes (2016-2020)
  • Associate Dean for Teaching (2011-2014)
  • Faculty Exchange at University of Southern Mississippi (2002-03)
  • Keele University, PhD (1996)
  • Keele University, MA (1989)
  • University of East Anglia, BA (1987)

Professional Responsibilities and Affiliations

  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
  • External Examiner (UG, PG, PhD) for De Montfort University, Edinburgh University, Keele University, Lancaster University, Leicester University, Liverpool University, Nottingham University, University College Worcester (2001- )
  • Member of the British Association of American Studies (1990- )
  • American Literature and Modernist Geographies section editor for Literature Compass (2012-2019)
  • Editorial work and reader reports for: 49th Parallel, ABES, Comparative American Studies, Crime. Media. Culture, The Feminist Journal of criminology, History and Literature, The Journal of American Studies, Modern Language review, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Studies on Women Abstracts, Textual Practice, Theoretical Criminology, University Press of Mississippi.
  • AHRC peer review

Brian’s research focuses on contemporary U.S fiction, film and visual culture, crime and punishment, cultural geography and Marxist critical theory.

Don DeLillo and the Visual (Routledge, 2025) offers the first syncretic overview of visual culture and experience in the work of a leading American writer.

The Contemporary American Novel in Context (Continuum, 2011) was co-authored with two colleagues at Loughborough – Andrew Dix and Paul Jenner – and is an introduction to the genre which focuses on key texts, contexts and criticism.

Cruel and Unusual (Pluto, 2003) is a cultural history of punishment in North America. ‘Jarvis brilliantly shows how politics becomes part of everyday culture.... There is much here for all criminologists to engage with – indeed we must engage with it’ (Mike Presdee, Crime. Media. Culture 2006).

Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (Pluto Press, 1998) was described by John Kerrigan in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘path-breaking, yet modest… the fertility of the insights being produced by such critics as Brian Jarvis and Franco Moretti shows how valuable the findings of a new literary geography could be’.

Brian teaches on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules with a focus on American literature, film and critical theory.

  • Alex Boyd, ‘Style and Affect in Cormac McCarthy’
  • Mohammed Al-Obaidi: ‘Space in American Confessional Poetry’
  • Emily Dickinson: ‘Violence in Contemporary American Women’s Fiction’
  • Mabroka Elsanosi: ‘Religion in the Poetry of Robert Frost’
  • Sarah Downes: ‘Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film’
  • Oliver Haslam, ‘Minimalism and Affect in American Literature’
  • James Holden, ‘Intersections: Reading Science Fiction and Critical Thought’
  • Lorna Piatti-Farnell: ‘Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction’
  • Phil Smith, ‘Reading Art Spiegelman’
  • Mark Taylor, ‘Edward Said and Postcolonial Theory’
  • Tosha Taylor: ‘Captivity in American Horror Film’