Dr David Wylot

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in September 2019. 

Before that, I was a Teaching Fellow for the School of English and Drama and the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, which is where I also obtained my PhD in 2016. I completed my BA at the University of Kent, and my MA at the University of York.

Pronouns: he/him.

Research interests

I mainly work in the field of contemporary and twenty-first century literature studies, with specific focus on narrative form, time, and critical and cultural theory.

My book, Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2020), covers the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first century fiction and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood through the tropes of contingency and accident. Making a case for the importance of fictional representations of accident as a means of studying temporal experience, the book offers a phenomenology of narrative to suggest that the dual experience of contingency and necessity when reading a written accident models the ways in which narrative makes sense of accidents in life. My next project, provisionally titled Narrative Materiality, builds on this by drawing on recent work in book history and material cultures to reassess narratological concepts through a medium-specific lens, all the while considering the historical and political contexts that inform reading practices in the present. 

Alongside this, I have published on US cinema, contingency, and political theory for Textual Practice (2019) and have co-authored an article with Niall Gildea on theories of literary periodisation for Modernist Cultures (2019), which critically examines efforts to ‘futurise’ modernism in the US and UK academy.  

I am also more broadly interested in recent developments in critical and cultural theory, especially work on time, narrative, and the ‘material turn’, and I co-organised, while in London, the seminar series ‘Theory Now’ for the Institute of English Studies at Senate House.   

Qualifications

• PhD Queen Mary, University of London
• MA University of York
• BA University of Kent

Professional memberships

• British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies
• Higher Education Academy, Associate Fellow

Research groups and institutes

• Critical Life Research Group
• Centre for the Comparative History of Print