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Professor Carl Plasa

BA (Oxon); MA, PhD (Southampton)

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Available for postgraduate supervision

Teams and roles for Carl Plasa

Overview

I am part of the School's English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory research groups. 

My current project is a monograph exploring literary reimaginings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal in literature by women from the late 1950s to the present day. 

I have written numerous essays and articles on British, American, Caribbean and African American Literature, as well as four books: Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool University Press, 2009); Charlotte Brontë (Palgrave, 2004); and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (Macmillan, 2000). 

 

 

Publication

2025

2024

2023

2021

2019

2018

2017

2015

2014

2013

2012

2010

  • Plasa, C. 2010. Saccharographies. In: Emig, R. and Lindner, O. eds. Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English. Cross/cultures Vol. 127. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 41-61.

2009

2008

2007

2005

2004

  • Plasa, C. 2004. Charlotte Brontë. Critical Issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

2001

2000

1998

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

Articles

Book sections

Books

Research

Current project:

Pre-Raphaelite Revenants: Literary Afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The interlocking personal and creative lives of Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti have long held a fascination for biographers from Hall Caine and Violet Hunt to Jan Marsh. But they also have a compelling resonance for the literary writers on whom my current monograph-in-progress focuses, all of whom are female and located in the era between the late 1950s and the present day. While such writers necessarily take their cue from the biographical accounts of these two preeminent Pre-Raphaelites, they are not constrained by them. Instead, they remodel the Siddal-Rossetti story (in which they perhaps catch glimpses of themselves and other women) across different genres in ways that are original, adventurous and sometimes even audacious—and self-consciously informed by the era’s developing feminism. In thus engaging in these processes of imaginative recreation, the writers become oddly and ironically akin to the artist-figure in Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio,” whose obsessively proliferating portraits of his sitter do not render her “as she is, but as she fills his dream.”

The materials the book analyses (poems, novels and short stories) have hitherto attracted almost no critical attention and in this respect suffer from a marginalisation not dissimilar to that which afflicted Siddal’s own artistic and poetic output until the late 1980s. Just as the stature of Siddal’s work since that time has been increasingly recognised, so her contemporary literary afterlives—and those of Rossetti, with which they are profoundly intermeshed—now need to be brought to light, exhumed, so to speak, from the silence in which they have been largely buried.

Research interests:

  • Literary afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  • Pre-Raphaelitism
  • Victorian Literature
  • Literary and visual representations of slavery (1760 to the present day)

Teaching

My current teaching portfolio includes first-year lectures on Transforming Visions: Text and Image, together with a second-year module on African American literature from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison and a third-year module on literary representations of Caribbean slavery from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. I also teach an MA option on the literary afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal.

Biography

I am currently a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff, having worked previously at the Universities of Manchester and Cork.

Supervisions

I would welcome applications from students working in any of the following areas:

  • Pre-Raphaelitism and its literary legacies
  • Literary and visual representations of slavery (1760 to the present day)
  • Ekphrastic literature
  • Charlotte Brontë
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I am currently supervising one doctoral student:

Morgan Lee, researching spectrality in Tennyson's poetry, with particular reference to forms of literary and cultural memory:

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/research-students/view/2611373-

 

Current supervision

Morgan Lee

Morgan Lee

Past projects

Since 1994, I have supervised (or co-supervised) the successful completion of 16 PhDs: 

2025: Joanne Rush (co-supervision with Professor Gerard Woodward at Bath Spa University): “The Girl in the Locket and Imagining Lost Stories: Ekphrasis as a Response to Archival Gaps” (AHRC-funded Creative Writing thesis).

2023: Gareth Smith, "Wilde, Wildeblood and the Welfare State: Exploring Homosexuality, Class and Culture on Page, Stage and Screen in Britain, 1945-67" (co-supervision with Professor Irene Morra, University of Toronto).

2016: Caleb Sivyer, “The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter.”

2014: Jayne Thomas, “From Allusion to Intertext: Reading Wordsworth in Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins.”

2014: Mohamed Maaloum, “The Loss of the Referent: Identity and Fragmentation in Richard Wright’s Fiction.”

2013: Phillip Roberts, “Cinema and Control.”

2013: Theresa Wray, “A Reappraisal of the Short Stories of Mary Lavin.”

2011: Anthony Austin, “‘The Great Dread of Our Age’: Reading Alzheimer’s and the Gothic.”

2009: Renée Chow, “Postcolonial Hauntologies: Creole Identity in Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen.”

2008: Jodie Matthews (currently Research Fellow, Academy for British and Irish Studies, University of Huddersfield), “Reading the Victorian Gypsy.”

2004: Dale Duddridge, “‘Ein Anderer Schauplatz’: Theatrical Visions in Freudian Psychoanalysis.”

2002: Sean Purchase, “Dickens’s Silent Empire.”

2001: Adam Woodruff, “Walter Benjamin and Modernism: Towards a Poetics of Urban Representation.”

1999: Tiffany Atkinson (currently Professor of Creative Writing, University of East Anglia), “The Dissenting Flesh: Corporeality, Representation and Theory.”

1998: Simon Lee-Price, “Racial Hybridity and the Harlem Renaissance: History, Literature, Theory.”

1996: Alan Grossman (currently Director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, Dublin Institute of Technology), “‘Things Welsh’: Identities on the March(es).”

 

Contact Details

Email [email protected]
Telephone +44 29208 75013
Campuses John Percival Building, Room 2.13, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU

Research themes

Specialisms

  • Literature and slavery
  • ekphrasis
  • Victorian literature
  • Pre-Raphaelite afterlives