Dr Vike Martina Plock

MA and PhD (York)
Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Literature

Biography

I obtained my first degree in Cultural Studies from the Europa-Universtät Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany before starting my postgraduate studies at the University of York where I completed my doctoral dissertation on James Joyce and medicine under the supervision of Lawrence Rainey in 2005. After obtaining my PhD, I held temporary lectureships at Durham University (2006), University College Dublin (2006-2007) and Cardiff University (2007-2009) before joining the Division of English and Creative Writing in May 2009.

Teaching Interests

I have delivered a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules during my academic career, including lectures, seminars and tutorials on James Joyce, literary modernism and modernity, nineteenth-century literature and culture and on the relationship between literature and science. At Northumbria University I am currently offering a third-year module entitled ‘Fashion, Clothes and Literary Modernity’ and I am also contributing to teaching on the core lecture courses ‘The Literary Canon’ and ‘Modernism and Modernity’.

Research Interests

My research focuses on modernist literature and the cultural history of modernity. I have published widely on James Joyce and his lifelong interest in medicine and I am currently guest-editing a special issue of the journal James Joyce Quarterly on the topic of Joyce’s physiologies. This interest in Joyce and medicine has also led me to investigate the relationship between literature and the sciences more broadly and this aspect of my research is reflected in an article on Edith Wharton and neurology that is forthcoming in the collection Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950, ed. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Palgrave, 2010). It has also led to the organisation of an international conference on the literary and cultural constructions of modern phobias that was hosted by the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science at the University of Glamorgan in May 2009. My current research investigates the centrality of fashion and clothes in modernist women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. In April 2009 I obtained a Fleur Cowles Endowment Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to carry out research for this new project. I have been invited to present aspects of my research at universities in Durham, Leeds, Oxford, Dublin, Trieste, Zurich and the School of Advanced Studies in London.     

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised postgraduate research on a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors and contexts, including projects on sensation novels and the representation of mental asylums, the role of the periodical press in H.G. Wells’s fiction and advertising in the fiction of J.G. Ballard. I would welcome inquiries from anyone interested in postgraduate research in modernism/modernity, James Joyce, modernist women writing, literature and science or nineteenth-century literature and culture.  

Funding Awards

2009 Wellcome Trust Conference Grant

2009 Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference Grant

2009 Fleur Cowles Endowment Fellowship, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

Affiliations and Memberships

Modern Language Association

Modernist Studies Association

British Association for Modernist Studies

International James Joyce Foundation

British Society for Literature and Science

Feminist and Women’s Studies Association

International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures

The Edith Wharton Society

Selected Publications

Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010).

‘Joyce and Medicine’, in Joyce in Context, ed. by John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 250-61.

‘Modernism’s Feast on Science: Nutrition and Diet in Joyce’s Ulysses’, Literature & History, 16.2 (2007), 30-42.

‘Why Does Gerty Limp?’, in Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, ed. by Sebastian Knowles, Geert Lernout and John McCourt (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), pp. 119-30.

‘A Feat of Strength in “Ithaca”: Eugen Sandow and Physical Culture in Ulysses’, Journal of Modern Literature, 30.1 (2006), 129-39.

Full Publication List