Ann-Marie researches and teaches modern and contemporary literature and culture and was PI on the AHRC-funded project 'Ephemera and writing about war, 1914 to the present' (2021-2024). She joined the Department of Humanities at Northumbria as Lecturer in January 2012, having previously studied and taught at Durham and at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She works primarily in the fields of First World War studies and early-twentieth-century British literature and culture, with special interests in short fiction, in periodicals and, more recently, in the reviewing and reception of foreign-language literature in inter-war Britain. Ann-Marie has additional research interests in links between the teaching, literature and remembrance of war, and in the interrelation between literature and history/historiography. She works and publishes on a wide range of early-twentieth-century writers and magazines, and on contemporary historical fiction about the First World War. Ann-Marie is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the English Association, and teaches across several programmes and modules on modernist literature, war and conflict, and on literature and identity. She welcomes inquiries from prospective postgraduate students wishing to work on any aspect of literature and/of conflict, inter-war magazine culture or modern British short fiction.
My primary research interests are writing about the First World War, the short story, ephemerality, and European literary magazine culture of the war and inter-war period. I also have an interest in links between contemporary literary representations of the First World War and the war’s memory. My first monograph, The Short Story and the First World War (CUP, 2013), explored literary engagement with the war in the medium of short fiction in literary and popular magazines and anthologies from 1914 to the present. Related to these interests, I edited a new Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story (CUP, 2016), and co-edited (jointly with my colleague Katherine Baxter) the Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts for Edinburgh University Press in 2017.
At present I'm working on a new book project with the working title 'First World War Writing, the Ephemeral and the Everyday in Britain, 1914 to the present'. The book comes out of my collaborative project, ‘Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present’ (Sep 2021-May 2024, funded by the AHRC). As Principal Investigator on this project, I led an interdisciplinary team of 5 researchers from history, literary studies, creative writing across two institutions.
This latest project has grown out of a longer-standing interest in the way in which the First World War and its literature are taught in secondary schools and universities across the UK, and I was Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded exploratory research project - 'The First World War in the Classroom: Teaching and the Construction of Cultural Memory' (2013-2014) - with Dr Catriona Pennell at the University of Exeter. Our project was based on a survey of secondary-school teachers in England, exploring aims, methods and topics connected with teaching the First World War in the light of the war's upcoming centenaries and its coverage in the news, film and literature. Please visit the project website for details and a full project report.
I also acted as an Advisory Board member and event co-organiser for the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War research network (2017-2019), which brought together researchers and educators from the UK and different Commonwealth countries with an interest in how the two world wars are taught and commemorated by and for young people. More details are available on the network webpages.
A new exhibition by artist Helen Knowles opens at Northumbria University's Gallery North from…
An energy-efficient cooling system developed by scientists at Northumbria University has been…
The Spring 2025 edition of Northumbria University’s newspaper is available to collect on campus…
Northumbria University has announced the return of its annual, free-to-attend, ‘Working Well…
Law students from Northumbria were part of an international study group participating in a…
A Northumbria University graduate desperately seeking a stem cell transplant is turning to…
Back to top
