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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 women's literature 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

I am at present writing and researching a book provisionally titled Pre-Raphaelite Revenants: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal in Women's Literature. The interlocking personal and creative lives of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) and Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-62) have provided a seemingly inexhaustible source of fascination for biographers, with milestone contributions from Hall Caine, recollecting Rossetti just months after the artist-poet’s death, to Violet Hunt, producing the first if much-disparaged account of Siddal exactly fifty years later, to Jan Marsh, the leading authority on both figures since the mid-1980s. As much as they have captivated the biographers, however, Rossetti and Siddal have also been a perennial inspiration for creative writers, female ones particularly, even as there is as yet no full-length study of the work this specific authorial grouping has produced. This is a situation this monograph proposes to change, traversing a wide array of poetic and fictional texts written by women between the late 1950s and the present day which have to date elicited minimal to no critical analysis.

Pre-Raphaelite Revenants articulates a rich and dynamic literary history that has not yet been adequately recognised and mapped. It encompasses a diverse mix of works from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and the Republic of Ireland and is concerned throughout with their intertextual and intermedial operations, using the techniques of close reading to underpin and advance the analysis. The book’s project is a timely one, adding new dimensions to a body of scholarly inquiry about Rossetti, Siddal and their complex interactions which is already extensive yet surely destined further to evolve with the approaching bicentennials of their respective births. 

 

 

Research interests:

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

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
  • African American Literature

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

Research Student/Graduate Tutor

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 Plasa@cardiff.ac.uk
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
  • Literary afterlives of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal