enlarge

Click on the thumbnails to view in the gallery

Dr Leo Gwilym Mellor

Telephone: 01223 762294
E-mail: lgm22@cam.ac.uk

Murray Edwards College
Cambridge
CB3 0DF

Dr Leo Mellor

Fellow and Director of Studies, Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of English

Leo Mellor read English for a BA at King's College, Cambridge, from 1996-1999. He then worked and studied in Sapporo (northern Japan), Berlin and Wales. At the University of Sussex he completed an MA in 2001, specialising in the relationship between literature and ruins in the twentieth century. In 2002 he returned to Cambridge to work on a PhD about the poet George Barker (1913-1991); this included chapters on autodidactism and classical knowledge, the apocalyptic movement in poetry, interwar writing on British landscapes, Modernism and the body, and experimental film.

He was appointed as a College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Murray Edwards College in January 2006 and later that year as a Newton Trust Lecturer in the English Faculty.  His research is now focused on Modernism, Second World War fiction and poetry, and the relationship between locale and literature. He is currently completing his first monograph for Cambridge University Press.

He teaches for both parts of the English Tripos. For Part I. these include paper 4 (1830- present day) and paper 6 (Literary Criticism); for Part II paper 1 (Practical Criticism), paper 7d (Modernism and the Short Story), paper 11 (American Literature), and paper 12c (Literature in English since 1979), as well as a small amount for several other papers. He also supervises undergraduate dissertations on many nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics.

His graduate teaching includes a jointly taught course on the 'post-pastoral' for the Culture and Criticism MPhil in 2009/10- http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/postgraduate/MPhil_Info_Criticism_Culture.htm and the supervision of MPhil and PhD students who work on the following areas: nature writing, wars and rumours of wars, the Modernist city, phenomenology, documentary writing & film, literary experimentation.

He is convenor of the Cambridge Centenary Symposia (in 2007 this focused on Rumer Godden and in 2008 on Nigel Balchin) . He also co-organisied the conference 'Passionate Natures' in 2007. He will be on leave from Murray Edwards during Michaelmas term 2009 as he has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship to work at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) on his new project 'Welsh Culture and the Politics of Water'. 

His own poetry has been published by Salt,  Landfill Press and Gecko (Berlin). In 2005 he was awarded the Harper-Wood studentship for English Poetry and Literature by St John's College for travel to Patagonia; poetry produced from this trip investigated the traces left by Welsh settlers and the continued survival in Argentina of the Welsh language. Some of the poems are in his new book Maps to Sound which will be published by Equipage. His wider interests include archaeology, sailing and islands.

Academic Publications

• 'Words from the bombsites: debris, modernism and literary salvage' in Critical Quarterly, vol 46, issue 4, Dec 2004, 73-90.
• 'War Journalism in English' in the Cambridge Companion to The Literature of World War II ed. Marina Mackay (Cambridge, 2009),  67-80.

Academic Reviews

• 'Here Not Here', review of Alice Oswald's Woods etc & Colin Simms' Otters and Martens, in The Times Literary Supplement, June 3 2005, 7.
• Review of Ian Patterson's Guernica and Total War, in Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (Jan 2008), 199-200

Selected articles, journalism and other work

• 'Simply reheat and critique', Times Higher Education Supplement, Textbook Guide, May 25 2007, xiv.
• 'Natural Attractions and Convivial Conversations', (article on the Passionate Natures conference), Times Higher Education Supplement, September 14 2007, 18-19.
• Programme essay for an evening of song cycles (Mendelssohn, Respighi, Berlioz and Vaughan Williams),  London Lyric Opera, September 2008.
• 'Cambridge Poetry' for The University of Cambridge - an 800th Anniversary Portrait, ed. Peter Pagementa (2008), 141-43
• Contributor to 'The Monserrat Archive', BBC Radio 4, broadcast February 2009.
• Review of Caught By the River, Independent on Sunday, June 21 2009  

Conference Papers

• 'The body-in-the-land / the-land-in-the-body: sensual topophilia in 1930s literature' (Cambridge, Twentieth-century literature seminar, 2009)
• 'Attention and distraction in the modern city (Siobhan Davies Dance Studio, London, 2009)
• 'Experiment and beyond: Malcolm Lowry's juvenalia' (University of Sussex, Malcolm Lowry: Fifty years on, 2007)
• 'The flowers of the rubble' (Museum of Garden History, London, Wild Cities Conference, 2007)
• 'Glide-paths and crash-burns: Rex Warner's The Aerodrome' (Cambridge, Rex Warner Centenary Symposium, 2005)
• "The same war on a stronger toe': John Wyndham and the literary transition between WWII and the Cold War'
  (London, Nuclear Anxiety: the Cold War Novel and its culture, 2005)
• '"They were drunk of course . . .': Intoxication, Pleasure and Menace in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square.'
  (Cambridge, Patrick Hamilton Centenary Symposium, 2004)
• 'Holy Silence in David Gascoyne's cities'
  (Toronto, Cities of the Mind, 2004)
• 'Dylan Thomas & George Barker: reading landscapes & bodies & hatreds'
  (Swansea, The Noise of History, 2003)
• 'Smashed Up Stuff Looks Different: re-reading Edward Upward's The Railway Accident'
  (Cambridge, Edward Upward Centenary Symposium, 2003)

In Preparation

• The Bombsite and Beyond: Modernism, Ruins and British Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• 'War and the City' for The Edinburgh Companion to twentieth-century English and American War Literature, eds. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)