Professor Daniel Williams

• Untitled (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Kirsti Bohata

• Reading the British Mountainscape: Tour Writing and poetry on mountain landscapes, 1930-1955. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Kirsti Bohata

• 'Intimate Otherness in Welsh Writing in English and Anglo-Irish Literature' (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Kirsti Bohata

• The Cyfarwydd - an exploration of the role of the storyteller and the impact of myth creation from Medieval times to the present day. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alan Bilton

• Arnold Bennett: A Critical Re-evaluation of his novels and literary criticism (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Richard Robinson

• Dictators and spectators: An Objectivist analysis of the philosophical and politico-legal systems of authoritarian regimes in dystopian fiction, 1932–1958. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Richard Robinson

• Welsh or American? The shift in patriotism amongst the Welsh-American communities during and following the American Civil War. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Gethin Matthews

• Beyond the Myth - finding the truth and drama in a biographical screenplay. (awarded 2023)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof David Britton

• Shakespeare, Race and Minstrelsy: American Culture 1800 -1865 (awarded 2023)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Rachel Farebrother

• Europe, Curry and India: A Case of Culinary Colonialism (awarded 2023)

  MA

  Other supervisor: Dr Rachel Farebrother

• EN-120 English Essentials

  This is a skills-based module which will equip students with the technical and critical expertise that is necessary for their academic journey in English Literature and Creative Writing. It is designed to support the transition from post-16 study to undergraduate study and to show students *how* to become successful scholars of English. How should we read texts? How do we write essays? Focusing on an exciting anthology of texts selected by the English academics at Swansea, this team-taught module uncovers the power of written language. We will explore how writers inspire and challenge their readers, how to think critically, how to close-read, how to construct powerful arguments and how to produce written work that is rigorous, academic and convincing. This module empowers students to think, write, and persuade.

• EN-206 Debating Texts: Theory in Literature

  Literature prompts debate, and speaks to us differently depending on the questions that we ask of it. This course looks at how our understanding of meaning in literature changes when we think about critical debates concerning the role of history, language and subjectivity in texts. We take three very different texts from different periods, and look at the ways in which the texts (and debates around them) raise questions of history, language and subjectivity, and how the texts comment on these issues. We begin with a classic of 19th century realism, Charles Dickens's HARD TIMES (1854), move on to the groundbreaking work of modernist experiment, Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY (1925), and end with a powerful example of postmodern representation, Toni Morrison's BELOVED (1987). The course will be taught by a formal lecture followed by a discussion forum, in which short passages of literary and theoretical text will be read and debated in the lecture theatre.

• EN-207 Revolution of the Word: Modernism

  An introduction to Modernist literature, focussing upon its origins in response to the crisis of modernity, its engagement with colonialism and the First World War, its formal experimentation, its depiction of city-life and its engagement with new ideas of gender and the unconscious.

• EN-241 Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain

  The nationality question has been a persistent theme in British politics, most obviously in recent decades in relationship to questions of immigration and settlement, Britain¿s membership of Europe, the `troubles¿ and `peace process¿ in Ulster, and the resurgence of forms of devolution and nationalism in Wales and Scotland. This course explores the ways in which the diverse literatures of the British Isles have responded to, and shaped, debates around these issues. The questions asked on the course will include: How does a `four nations¿ approach, well-established in historical studies, function in literary studies? What are the key differences and similarities between the literatures produced in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? To what extent does literature reflect social identities, and to what extent is it active in their creation? If all identities are in as sense `imagined¿, why have certain kinds of identities been significant in particular periods? Is an aesthetics informed by nationalism inevitably conservative and restrictive? Are linguistically experimental writers always skeptical of collective identities? Are we witnessing the `break up¿ of Britain in contemporary literature, or is Britishness being reconstructed anew?

• EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

  The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module designed to develop high-level academic skills and intellectual independence in the students. A first-semester skills-building programme will include: research skills, summary skills, bibliographic skills, ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation of a thesis and bibliography, presentational skills and public speaking. Students conduct research on a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of the English literature staff. The topic will be devised to fall within staff research and teaching specialisms, broadly defined. Students attend group sessions on research skills in Semesters 1 and 2, and have individual meetings with supervisors in Semester 2.

• EN-M31 Dissertation

  Individual project devised and defined in discussion between supervisor and student.

• EN-M41 Research Practice in English / Contemporary Writing / Welsh Writing in English

  Supervised project on research methodology in practice. Students build a detailed bibliographical plan for their MA dissertation project.

• EN-M42 Welsh Identities: literature and nationhood

  What does it mean when we speak of Wales and 'Welshness'? How does the study of literary texts help us to answer such questions? What is the relationship between literature and nationhood? Drawing on a wide range of texts this course begins by exploring the ways in which Welsh national identity has been described and represented by Welsh writers in the twentieth century. We then proceed to explore other kinds of communal identities that have been equally prominent in the ways in which the Welsh have thought of themselves and envisaged their place in the world. We explore how class, gender, religious and ethnic identities have reinforced and challenged an often precarious sense of ' Welshness', and trace the tensions as they take aesthetic form in the writings of Emyr Humphreys, Christopher Meredith, Raymond Williams, Trezza Azzopardi and others.

• EN-M44 Gender, Genre and the Nation: Women Writing Modern Wales

  This course explores the range and diversity of Welsh women's writing in English. We will question and explore the legitimacy of reading and organizing literary texts along lines of gender, will ask whether there is a distinctive form of Welsh women's writing, and interrogate the ways in which forms of feminism have interacted with other cultural forces and political ideologies (eg class, nationalism, language) in Wales. We begin by exploring ideas of tradition and canon formation in the light of feminist criticism before going on to discuss the writings of early Welsh feminists and their relationship with nation (Amy Dillwyn, Bertha Thomas, Sara Maria Saunders), before moving on to look at Welsh women modernists (Lynette Roberts, Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Hilda Vaughan), rewriting industrial and post-industrial experience (Kate Roberts, Menna Gallie, Rachel Trezise), and a range of contemporary of contemporary voices animating the Welsh literary scene from Catrin Dafydd and Gwyneth Lewis to Trezza Azzopardi and Charlotte Williams. There will be two additional (optional) sessions in the archives to introduce students to using archival resources in their studies.

In the Dylan Thomas Centenary Year of 2014, Daniel Williams was commissioned by Literature Wales to develop ‘Dylan Live’, a collaboration with leading poets and musicians that explored the Swansea poet’s impact on the United Sates. The show toured Wales and was featured at the major literary festivals of Dinefwr and Being Human (Wales), Fitzrovia (London) and PEN (New York). He was also Advisor for the Telesgop / Welsh Assembly educational resource project on Dylan Thomas. http://www.rockandrollpoet.co.uk

Professor Williams has arranged and contributed to sessions on Welsh culture and politics at the Hay-on-Wye Festival. He is a frequent contributor on the media in Wales and England, in Welsh and English. His media work has included discussing culture and industrialism on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Country’ (May 5, 2018), poet Idris Davies on Radio 4’s ‘Forgotten History’ (21 November, 2015), ‘Political and Bardic Traditions in Wales’ with Gwyneth Lewis and Iain Sinclair on BBC 3’s ‘Free Thinking’ (23 June, 2015) and in 2006 he presented a 1 hour documentary - ‘Hanes Cudd y Molly Maguires’ – exploring ethnic tensions in the coalfields of 19th century Pennsylvania (Broadcast on S4C, 28th November 2006).

Daniel Williams has lectured across Europe, the Americas, Japan and India. He has organised several conferences in Wales and the United States including ‘Transatlantic Exchange: African Americans and the Celtic Nations (2007), ‘Spaces of Comparison: Welsh Writing in Comparative Contexts’ (2009), ‘Culture and Society @ 50’ (2009), NAASWCH Annual Conference (2016). Recent lectures have been delivered at the British Studies Seminar Series at the University of Texas, Austin, a ‘Wales in India’ British Council lecture in Kolkata, India, and keynote lectures at conferences on Raymond Williams in Berlin and Sao Paulo, Brazil.