Professor Carl Plasa
BA (Oxon); MA, PhD (Southampton)
Professor
- Available for postgraduate supervision
Overview
I am part of the School's English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory research groups.
My current project is a monograph exploring the literary legacies of Elizabeth Siddal in a range of bioigraphical, fictional and poetic texts published since 1932, the year which saw the appearance of Violet Hunt's wonderfully undisciplined The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death. Please see under 'Research' for a working abstract.
I have written numerous essays and articles on British, American, Caribbean and African American Literature, as well as three books: Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool UP, 2009); Charlotte Brontë (Palgrave, 2004); and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (Macmillan, 2000). I have also completed a further book titled Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in its “Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures” series in October 2023 (in press).
Also in press:
“Charlotte Brontë’s Mythic Figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon,’ The Professor and Jane Eyre,” in Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts, ed. Deborah Wynne and Amber Regis (publication 2023 or early 2024).
Please see "Publications" for a fuller list of published works.
Publication
2025
- Plasa, C. 2025. Charlotte Brontë’s mythic figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon,’ The Professor and Jane Eyre. In: Wynne, D. and Regis, A. eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207-220.
2024
- Plasa, C. 2024. Lost and found: Textual and intertextual retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation letters and the 'Willowwood' sonnets. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 33, pp. 190-225. (10.25623/conn033-plasa-1)
2023
- Plasa, C. 2023. Literature, art and slavery: Ekphrastic visions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2021
- Plasa, C. 2021. Race and gender: Inkle, Yarico, intertextual revisions and the problem of female vengeance. In: Hudson, N. ed. A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment., Vol. 4. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 127-143.
2019
- Plasa, C. 2019. Rewriting conjure: routes of revision in Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham and Jewell Parker Rhodes. In: Mellis, J. ed. Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature: critical essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 31-50.
2018
- Plasa, C. 2018. Towards a bigger picture: transatlantic ekphrasis in William B. Patrick's 'The Slave Ship'. The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11(2), pp. 27-59. (10.30395/WSR.201806_11(2).0003)
2017
- Plasa, C. 2017. 'In another light': new intertexts for David Dabydeen's 'Turner'. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 26, pp. 163-203.
2015
- Plasa, C. 2015. Poetry in the archive: reimagining Amistad in Kevin Young's Ardency. In: Metcalf, J. and Spaulding, C. eds. African American Culture and Society after Rodney King: Provocations and Protests, Progression and 'Post-Racialism'. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 83-106., (10.4324/9781315565989-11)
- Plasa, C. 2015. Ekphrastic poetry and the Middle Passage: recent encounters in the Black Atlantic. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 24(2), pp. 290-324.
2014
- Plasa, C. 2014. Tim Armstrong, The logic of slavery: debt, technology, and pain in American literature [Book Review]. Review of English Studies 65(269), pp. 377-379. (10.1093/res/hgt099)
- Plasa, C. 2014. Prefigurements and afterlives: Bertha Mason's literary histories. Bronte Studies 39(1), pp. 6-13. (10.1179/1474893213Z.00000000091)
2013
- Plasa, C. 2013. "The object of his craving": loss and compensation in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In: Emig, R. ed. Treasure in Literature and Culture. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 117-132.
- Plasa, C. 2013. "Mainly story-telling and play-acting": theatricality and the Middle Passage in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. In: Gohrisch, J. and Grünkemeier, E. eds. Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 151-166.
- Plasa, C. 2013. Black skin, blue books: African Americans and Wales, 1845-1945 by Daniel G. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012) [Book Review]. New Welsh Review 99, pp. 89-91.
2012
- Plasa, C. 2012. Simon Gikandi. Slavery and the culture of taste [Book Review]. The Review of English Studies 63(261), pp. 705-706. (10.1093/res/hgs009)
- Plasa, C. 2012. "Tangled skeins": Henry Timrod's The Cotton Boll and the slave narratives. Southern Literary Journal 45(1), pp. 1-20. (10.1353/slj.2012.0025)
- Plasa, C. 2012. Doing the slave trade in different voices: poetics and politics in Robert Hayden’s first Middle Passage. African American Review 45(4), pp. 557-573.
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
- Plasa, C. 2009. Slaves to sweetness: British and Caribbean literatures of sugar. Liverpool Studies in International Slavery Vol. 1. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
- Plasa, C. 2009. Imperialism, reform, and the making of Englishness in Jane Eyre [Book Review]. Women's Writing 16(2), pp. 353-355. (10.1080/09699080903016771)
2008
- Plasa, C. 2008. "Conveying away the trash": sweetening slavery in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 50(8) (10.7202/018150ar)
2007
- Plasa, C. 2007. "Stained with spots of human blood": sugar, abolition and cannibalism. Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives 4(2), pp. 225-243. (10.1080/14788810701510860)
2005
- Plasa, C. 2005. George Eliot's "confectionery business": sugar and slavery in Brother Jacob. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 16(3), pp. 285-309. (10.1080/10436920500183878)
2004
- Plasa, C. 2004. Charlotte Brontë. Critical Issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2001
- Plasa, C. ed. 2001. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism. Icon.
2000
- Plasa, C. ed. 2000. Toni Morrison, Beloved: a reader's guide to essential criticism. Icon Reader's Guides to Essential Criticism. Icon.
- Plasa, C. 2000. Textual politics from slavery to postcolonialism: race and identification. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Plasa, C. 2000. Charlotte Brontë's foreign bodies: slavery and sexuality in The Professor. Journal of Narrative Theory 30(1), pp. 1-28.
1998
- Plasa, C. 1998. "To whom does he address himself?": Reading Wordsworth in Browning's Pauline. In: Day, G. ed. Varieties of Victorianism: The Uses of a Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161-178.
- Plasa, C. 1998. Tennyson revised: influence and doubling in Four Quartets. Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 2(1), pp. 56-74.
- Plasa, C. 1998. Reading "the geography of hunger" in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: from Frantz Fanon to Charlotte Brontë. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33(1), pp. 35-45. (10.1177/002200949803300104)
1995
- Plasa, C. 1995. Fantasias of war: language, intertextuality and gender in Dulce et Decorum Est. Krieg und Literatur / War and Literature 1, pp. 61-78.
- Plasa, C. 1995. Revision and repression in Keats's Hyperion: "pure creations of the poet's brain". Keats-Shelley Journal 44, pp. 117-146.
1994
- Plasa, C. 1994. "Silent revolt": slavery and the politics of metaphor in Jane Eyre. In: Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge, pp. 64-93.
- Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. 1994. Introduction. In: Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge, pp. xiii-xix.
- Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. 1994. The discourse of slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge.
1993
- Plasa, C. 1993. "Qui est là": race, identity and the politics of fantasy in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gulliver: Deutsch-Englische Jahrbücher, pp. 42-59.
1992
- Plasa, C. 1992. "Cracked from side to side": sexual politics in The Lady of Shalott. Victorian Poetry 30(3/4), pp. 247-264.
1991
- Plasa, C. 1991. Lost in the Post-Miltonic: reading Keats's letters. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 15(1), pp. 30-48. (10.1080/01440359208586457)
- Plasa, C. 1991. Reading Tennyson in Four Quartets: The example of East Coker. English: The Journal of the English Association 40(168), pp. 239-258. (10.1093/english/40.168.239)
Articles
- Plasa, C. 2024. Lost and found: Textual and intertextual retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation letters and the 'Willowwood' sonnets. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 33, pp. 190-225. (10.25623/conn033-plasa-1)
- Plasa, C. 2018. Towards a bigger picture: transatlantic ekphrasis in William B. Patrick's 'The Slave Ship'. The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11(2), pp. 27-59. (10.30395/WSR.201806_11(2).0003)
- Plasa, C. 2017. 'In another light': new intertexts for David Dabydeen's 'Turner'. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 26, pp. 163-203.
- Plasa, C. 2015. Ekphrastic poetry and the Middle Passage: recent encounters in the Black Atlantic. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 24(2), pp. 290-324.
- Plasa, C. 2014. Tim Armstrong, The logic of slavery: debt, technology, and pain in American literature [Book Review]. Review of English Studies 65(269), pp. 377-379. (10.1093/res/hgt099)
- Plasa, C. 2014. Prefigurements and afterlives: Bertha Mason's literary histories. Bronte Studies 39(1), pp. 6-13. (10.1179/1474893213Z.00000000091)
- Plasa, C. 2013. Black skin, blue books: African Americans and Wales, 1845-1945 by Daniel G. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012) [Book Review]. New Welsh Review 99, pp. 89-91.
- Plasa, C. 2012. Simon Gikandi. Slavery and the culture of taste [Book Review]. The Review of English Studies 63(261), pp. 705-706. (10.1093/res/hgs009)
- Plasa, C. 2012. "Tangled skeins": Henry Timrod's The Cotton Boll and the slave narratives. Southern Literary Journal 45(1), pp. 1-20. (10.1353/slj.2012.0025)
- Plasa, C. 2012. Doing the slave trade in different voices: poetics and politics in Robert Hayden’s first Middle Passage. African American Review 45(4), pp. 557-573.
- Plasa, C. 2009. Imperialism, reform, and the making of Englishness in Jane Eyre [Book Review]. Women's Writing 16(2), pp. 353-355. (10.1080/09699080903016771)
- Plasa, C. 2008. "Conveying away the trash": sweetening slavery in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 50(8) (10.7202/018150ar)
- Plasa, C. 2007. "Stained with spots of human blood": sugar, abolition and cannibalism. Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives 4(2), pp. 225-243. (10.1080/14788810701510860)
- Plasa, C. 2005. George Eliot's "confectionery business": sugar and slavery in Brother Jacob. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 16(3), pp. 285-309. (10.1080/10436920500183878)
- Plasa, C. 2000. Charlotte Brontë's foreign bodies: slavery and sexuality in The Professor. Journal of Narrative Theory 30(1), pp. 1-28.
- Plasa, C. 1998. Tennyson revised: influence and doubling in Four Quartets. Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 2(1), pp. 56-74.
- Plasa, C. 1998. Reading "the geography of hunger" in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: from Frantz Fanon to Charlotte Brontë. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33(1), pp. 35-45. (10.1177/002200949803300104)
- Plasa, C. 1995. Fantasias of war: language, intertextuality and gender in Dulce et Decorum Est. Krieg und Literatur / War and Literature 1, pp. 61-78.
- Plasa, C. 1995. Revision and repression in Keats's Hyperion: "pure creations of the poet's brain". Keats-Shelley Journal 44, pp. 117-146.
- Plasa, C. 1993. "Qui est là": race, identity and the politics of fantasy in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gulliver: Deutsch-Englische Jahrbücher, pp. 42-59.
- Plasa, C. 1992. "Cracked from side to side": sexual politics in The Lady of Shalott. Victorian Poetry 30(3/4), pp. 247-264.
- Plasa, C. 1991. Lost in the Post-Miltonic: reading Keats's letters. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 15(1), pp. 30-48. (10.1080/01440359208586457)
- Plasa, C. 1991. Reading Tennyson in Four Quartets: The example of East Coker. English: The Journal of the English Association 40(168), pp. 239-258. (10.1093/english/40.168.239)
Book sections
- Plasa, C. 2025. Charlotte Brontë’s mythic figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon,’ The Professor and Jane Eyre. In: Wynne, D. and Regis, A. eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207-220.
- Plasa, C. 2021. Race and gender: Inkle, Yarico, intertextual revisions and the problem of female vengeance. In: Hudson, N. ed. A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment., Vol. 4. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 127-143.
- Plasa, C. 2019. Rewriting conjure: routes of revision in Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham and Jewell Parker Rhodes. In: Mellis, J. ed. Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature: critical essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 31-50.
- Plasa, C. 2015. Poetry in the archive: reimagining Amistad in Kevin Young's Ardency. In: Metcalf, J. and Spaulding, C. eds. African American Culture and Society after Rodney King: Provocations and Protests, Progression and 'Post-Racialism'. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 83-106., (10.4324/9781315565989-11)
- Plasa, C. 2013. "The object of his craving": loss and compensation in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In: Emig, R. ed. Treasure in Literature and Culture. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 117-132.
- Plasa, C. 2013. "Mainly story-telling and play-acting": theatricality and the Middle Passage in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. In: Gohrisch, J. and Grünkemeier, E. eds. Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 151-166.
- 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.
- Plasa, C. 1998. "To whom does he address himself?": Reading Wordsworth in Browning's Pauline. In: Day, G. ed. Varieties of Victorianism: The Uses of a Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161-178.
- Plasa, C. 1994. "Silent revolt": slavery and the politics of metaphor in Jane Eyre. In: Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge, pp. 64-93.
- Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. 1994. Introduction. In: Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge, pp. xiii-xix.
Books
- Plasa, C. 2023. Literature, art and slavery: Ekphrastic visions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Plasa, C. 2009. Slaves to sweetness: British and Caribbean literatures of sugar. Liverpool Studies in International Slavery Vol. 1. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
- Plasa, C. 2004. Charlotte Brontë. Critical Issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Plasa, C. ed. 2001. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism. Icon.
- Plasa, C. ed. 2000. Toni Morrison, Beloved: a reader's guide to essential criticism. Icon Reader's Guides to Essential Criticism. Icon.
- Plasa, C. 2000. Textual politics from slavery to postcolonialism: race and identification. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Plasa, C. and Ring, B. J. eds. 1994. The discourse of slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge.
- Plasa, C. 2012. "Tangled skeins": Henry Timrod's The Cotton Boll and the slave narratives. Southern Literary Journal 45(1), pp. 1-20. (10.1353/slj.2012.0025)
Research
As noted on the 'Overview' page, I am at present researching a book on the literary legacies of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-62) across a range of texts written since 1932. As well as being an artist and a poet in her own right, Siddal was (briefly) wife to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and is well-known as the model for two of the Pre-Raphaelites’ most famous and enduring paintings, John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2) and Rossetti’s own Beata Beatrix (1864-70). She also had the distinction of being exhumed by her widower, some seven years after her death from a laudanum overdose, in order for him to retrieve the manuscript of his poems that he had buried with her in Highgate Cemetery’s Grave No. 5779. How have Siddal’s remarkable life and the even more remarkable aftermath to her demise, along with the paintings already adduced, been remembered and reimagined in the biographical, fictional and poetic texts produced over the period which this book encompasses?
With the approaching bicentenary of Siddal’s birth in 2029, increasing critical, creative and public attention is likely to be directed towards this multifaceted Pre-Raphaelite figure and this book is intended as a major contribution to these broad cultural developments (already evident in the shape of the 2023 exhibition, “The Rossettis,” at Tate Britain).
- Elizabeth Siddal and her literary afterlives
- Literary and visual representations of slavery
- African American literature
- Caribbean literature
- 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 titled Postcolonial Brontë.
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 my main research areas:
- Pre-Raphaelitism and its literary legacies
- Literary and visual representations of slavery
- Ekphrastic literature
- African American literature
- Victorian literature (particularly Charlotte Brontë and Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
I am currently supervising the following doctoral students:
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-
Gareth Smith, "Class, Culture and Citizenship: Queer Literature In Post-War Britain" (co-supervision with Professor Irene Morra, University of Toronto)
Joanne Rush (co-supervision with Professor Gerard Woodward at Bath Spa University): “(Re)constructing Historical Paintings: an exploration of the affective possibilities and veridical implications of notional portraiture in neo-historical fiction” (AHRC-funded Creative Writing thesis).
Past projects
Since 1996, I have supervised the successful completion of 14 PhDs, as detailed below:
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
+44 29208 75013
John Percival Building, Room 2.13, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU
Research themes
Specialisms
- The literary afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal
- Literature and slavery
- ekphrasis
- Victorian literature