Dr David Wylot

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in September 2019. Before that, I was a Teaching Fellow 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 work in modern and contemporary literature studies, with specific focus on narrative form, the book, time, and critical and cultural theory.

My first book, Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2020), explores 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.

I am currently working on two new research projects. The first builds on my prior work in narrative by drawing on recent studies in book history and material cultures to reassess narratological concepts through a medium-specific lens. I have published on this topic for ASAP/Journal (2023).

I am also developing a study of print technologies in the context of the mid- and late-twentieth-century British novel. The project explores the impact of changes in book production such as the development of phototypesetting on the production of post-war literary fiction.

Alongside this, I have published on contemporary metafiction and the book in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2025), US cinema and political theory for Textual Practice (2019), and have co-authored an article with Niall Gildea on theories of literary periodisation and modernism for Modernist Cultures (2019). I am also more broadly interested in recent developments in critical and cultural theory, especially work on time, narrative, and phenomenology.

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

Current postgraduate researchers

• George Allan