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Professor Carl Plasa

BA (Oxon); MA, PhD (Southampton)

Users
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 the literary legacies of Elizabeth Siddal in a range of bioigraphical, fictional, poetic and dramatic texts published since 1932, the year which saw the appearance of Violet Hunt's wonderfully undisciplined The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death. 

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

As noted on the 'Overview' page, I am at present researching a book on the literary legacies of Elizabeth 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 invidious 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 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 revenant and this monograph is intended as a major contribution to these broad cultural developments.

Research interests:

  • 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-

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).

Current supervision

Morgan Lee

Morgan Lee

Research Student/Graduate Tutor

Past projects

Since 1996, I have supervised the successful completion of 15 PhDs, as detailed below: 

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

  • The literary afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal
  • Literature and slavery
  • ekphrasis
  • Victorian literature