Staff profiles
Visiting professors / fellows
Professor William Baker
Presidential research professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is a scholar distinguished for his work in bibliography and editing, especially of the novel from the later eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is co-editor of a key work in the discipline, The Year's Work in English Studies (Oxford University Press), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association's Discussion Group on Textual and Bibliographical Studies. He has published widely in his field and has held a British Academy Thank-Offering Britain Fellowship.
Maggie Gee
Novelist. Her first published novel was Dying, in Other Words (1981). In 1982 Maggie Gee was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' by the Book Marketing Council and became writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. Recent novels include The White Family (2002), shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Flood (2004), and her most recent novel is My Cleaner (2005). Maggie Gee is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a Teaching Fellow at Sussex University.
Hilary Mantel
Novelist. Hilary Mantel's novels include Wolf Hall (2009) winner of the Man Booker Prize, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), Fludd (1989), winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her latest books are Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003), an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction told in four parts, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing, and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003). Hilary Mantel's latest novel is entitled Beyond Black (2005).
Professor Ray Siemens
Professor Ray Siemens is currently Canada research chair in humanities computing, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Professor Siemens has an impressive record as both a conventional scholar of Renaissance literature and as an innovator who has had a real impact on defining and exploring the emerging field of how computing and digital technologies can develop the nature of intellectual enquiry in the Humanities disciplines. He is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Digital Humanities (Oxford, 2004), a seminal work on the theory and practice of this new field as well as of numerous scholarly articles.
Visiting scholars
Dr Abolaji Samuel Mustapha
Dr Abolaji Samuel Mustapha is a British Academy Visiting Scholar to Sheffield Hallam University and is working on gender representation in English Language Texts for L2 Users under the supervision of Professor Sara Mills. He is a University of Lagos scholar (1987), a Commonwealth of Universities Scholarship Award holder (2000-2004), a DAAD Scholar (2008) and teaches sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, stylistics, and English language in a state university in Lagos, Nigeria, as a senior lecturer. He has about 30 publications in local and international journals including the Journal of Pragmatics, chapters in books published by reputable publishers in Nigeria, UK and Germany. His recent book, Gender in Language Use, was published by Lambert Academic Publishing in Germany in 2010.
