Dr Andrew Palmer

Andrew Palmer is the Course Director for the MA English Literature. His teaching includes the following modules: Literature, Memory and the First World War (MA),  Literature and Power in the Twentieth Century (Year 3), Literature Matters (Year 2), and Texts and Contexts (Year 1). He is the co-author, with Sally Minogue, of The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His current research concerns the collective narratives that drive violent conflict.

Dr. Palmer joined Canterbury Christ Church in 1996 as a lecturer in modern literature. In 2003, he founded the MA Creative Writing, and directed the programme for its first eight years. From 2011 to 2015, he was Programme Director of the Single Honours BA programme in English Literature. In 2013, he was Acting Head of Department for English and Language Studies. He is now the Course Director for the MA in English Literature. His teaching is focused on the literature of war, modernism, and literary power. He currently leads four modules: Literature, Memory and the First World War (MA),  Literature and Power in the Twentieth Century (Year 3), Literature Matters (Year 2), and Texts and Contexts (Year 1).

Dr. Palmer has worked for several years on the poetry of the First World War and related literature. His current research concerns the collective narratives that drive violent conflict. He is the co-author, with Sally Minogue, of The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This monograph interrogates notions of remembrance, mourning and commemoration as expressed, enacted and questioned in poetry arising from the First World War. He and Dr. Minogue have also contributed a chapter, ‘Modernism and First World War Poetry: Alternative Lines’, to the volume A History of Modernist Poetry (Ed. Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins, Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has also published work on Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, George Orwell and Alan Sillitoe.

• The bombing of the King David Hotel: textual spaces in international conflict. European International Studies Association Pan-European Conference. Université Catholique de Lille, 27-31 August, 2024.
• Reshaping conflict narratives in Israel-Palestine: quotidian spaces in international conflict. European International Studies Association Pan-European Conference, Université Catholique de Lille, 27-31 August, 2024.
• The ‘poetry-house in the forest’: La Maison Forestière and Owen’s afterlife. Wilfred Owen and/in France. Universté Polytechnique des Hauts de France, Valenciennes, 5-6 November, 2018.
• Woolf’s Politicians’. Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace (28^th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf). University of Kent, 21-24 June, 2018.
• 'The castle and the rose’: forging inherited space in the poetry of Vita Sackville-West’. Arts & Humanities Faculty Research Conference: Landscape, Space, and Place. Canterbury Christ Church University, 30 May, 2018.
• ‘Disquieting matter’: the unburied corpse in the poetry of Keith Douglas. The Human Body and WW2. University of Oxford, 23-24 March, 2018.
• ‘Pat Barker in “’The Smokey Cellar of the Forester’s House’”: reimagining Wilfred Owen’. Twenty-five Years of Regeneration: A Pat Barker Symposium, Durham University, 15 October 2016.
• ‘Remembering, we Forget; Poets, Artists and the First World War’. A public Lecture, delivered with Dr Sally Minogue (during the exhibition of the same name) at the Sidney Cooper Gallery, 3 December 2014.
• ‘"Vita Sackville-West’s “Sissinghurst’’: the politics and the poetry’. Delivered at the Letterpress Re-imagined Symposium, Sissinghurst Castle, 29 October 2014.
• ‘David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and Mythical Methods’. Delivered at the English Association Conference, British Poetry of the First World War, at Wadham College, Oxford University, September 2014.
• ‘Battlefield Tours and Public Memorials in the Poetry of the First World War’. Delivered at World War One as a Visitor Attraction, a symposium in the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University, October 2013.
• ‘David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and the “Mythic Method”.’ Paper delivered at the Alternative Modernisms Conference, Cardiff University, May 2013.
• ‘The market and the do-gooders: the effects of conglomeration and intervention in the world of literary fiction.’ Paper delivered at Publishing Futures in the Global Marketplace. Angela Ruskin University, May 2010.
• ‘"In the Shade of a Ghost Gum”: Bruce Chatwin and the Rhetoric of the Desert.’ Paper delivered by invitation at The Chatwin Symposium, New College, Oxford, July 2008.