David Barnes

Alongside my lecturing for Trinity, I hold a Senate House Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of London, where I will be researching historical attitudes to horses, cats, dogs, rats and other animals in 19^th and early 20^th-century London.

I also continue to work as a writer and occasional producer/presenter for radio. In May 2021, I co-produced ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ for BBC Radio 3, and in 2019, I wrote and presented ‘Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo’, also for Radio 3. ‘Escape of the Zebra’ used my research on animals in the city to follow a rare Grevys zebra that escaped from London Zoo during the Blitz of 1940, and galloped through Camden Town.

I currently teach the first-year undergraduate papers in Victorian and modern literature, Papers 3 and 4. I also teach on the first-year Paper 1: Introduction to Language and Literature.

I specialise in, broadly speaking, ‘Victorian’ and ‘modernist’ writing, with the occasional foray backwards and forwards.

I’m particularly interested in the role of cities in the modern cultural imaginary. My first book, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics (2014) explored the ways in which the contested politics and history of Venice shaped a range of literary and cultural responses from 1800 to the present. Current research interests focus on two areas of interest. Urban Animals is a project focusing on the role of the animal in the modern city, and features a range of literary figures, from Dickens to Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker to T.S. Eliot.

My second area of interest lies in exploring a range of ‘transatlantic’ cultural exchanges in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. It examines the ways in which ideologies of empire and race condition or determine the forms of exchange – literary or cultural – between Europe and the Americas. In 2017, I held a Lilian Gary Taylor Fellowship in Literature at the University of Virginia to research this project.

'What Hemingway Means in the Twenty-First Century'. Literary Hub, April 2023. https://lithub.com/what-hemingway-means-in-the-21st-century/

'Hemingway's British Accents'. Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 26.2. 2022.

'How T.S. Eliot's Therapeutic Practice Produced The Waste Land'. Literary Hub, October 2022. https://lithub.com/how-t-s-eliots-therapeutic-practice-produced-the-waste-land/

‘Pleasure and Politics: European and American Writers in Nineteenth-Century Venice’. In Viva Venezia! (catalogue for the Belvedere Gallery, Vienna). Cologne: Walther & Franz Konig, 2022.

‘“Race against Race, Immutable”: Pound’s Fascist Readings of Henry James’. Textual Practice 34:7. 2020.

‘Why British Tourists in Europe have Never Really Changed’. The New European, March 2020.

‘Canto 26’. In Readings in the Cantos Volume I, ed. Richard Parker (Liverpool University Press/ Clemson University Press). 2018.

‘Mexico, Revolution and Indigenous Politics in D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent’. Modern Fiction Studies 63:4. 2017.

‘“All the People in the Ring Together”: Hemingway, Performance and the Politics of the Corrida de Toros’ Modernist Cultures 11:1. 2016.

‘Introduction: New Transatlanticisms’. Modernist Cultures 11:1. 2016

Edited special issue: New Transatlanticisms. Modernist Cultures 11:1. 2016.

The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics 1800 to the Present (Routledge, 2014)

BBC Radio 3: Between the Ears - The Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo.

BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature - Regarding the Pain of Others.

BBC Radio 3: The Essay - Bonfire