Dr Rowland Hughes

I am a Principal Research Fellow in Humanities and Associate Professor in Research, with research and teaching specialisms in English and American literature. I am also an Associate Director of the Doctoral College with responsibility for postgraduate research students in the discplines of Humanities, Engineering, Business and Law.

Additionally, I am the co-ordinator for the English Language and Literature unit of assessment in preparation for REF 2029; the academic lead for our AHRC-funded Impact Acceleration Account (IAA); and the project lead for our AHRC Doctoral Landscape awards. 

Research

My research and writing focuses primarily on literature of the early American republic and the antebellum United States, with further interests in Native American literature, ecocriticism and human-animal studies.  I am the author of the York Notes Companion to Nineteenth Century American Literature.

Current and recent projects focus on:  chronological gaps and lost time in early American writing, as a response to the Constitutional moment; American historical fiction and Indian Removal in the 1820s and 1840s; the New Orleans pirate Jean Lafitte; and depictions of meat-eating in American writing.

I published a new critical edition, with notes and introduction, of Magdalen King-Hall's 1944 historical novel, Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (Hatfield: UH Press, 2016).

I delivered a series of talks about the novel and its links to the Hertfordshire legend of the 'Wicked Lady' highwaywoman at a number of free public events around the county from 2016-2019.

I would welcome applications and inquiries from students wishing to pursue postgraduate research on American literature, particularly colonial, early national, and nineteenth-century American literature; the American West; travel writing; indigenous writing; environmentalism and literature.

Background

I gained my undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, before going on to gain an MA in Anglo-American Literary Relations and a PhD from University College, London. I joined the University of Hertfordshire in 2003. I have held a number of roles: Humanities Programme Tutor for four years; School Research Tutor for five years; American Studies co-ordinator for ten years; Acting Head of English Literature and Creative Writing; and Associate Dean Research for the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Education, prior to our merger with Creative Arts, where I served as Head of Humanities Research from 2023-25. From 2021-22 I was interim Dean of the School of Humanities.

• Print culture of the early United States
• Nineteenth century American literature, especially the antebellum period
• Writing about the American West
• Transatlantic cultural exchange
• Native American writing
• Literature and the environment

Successful research student supervision:

• ‘Colour, Dress and Modernism: The significance of colour in representations of clothing in modernist literature by women’ (PhD in English Literature)
•  ‘Hand-me-down Haircut: Exploring Representations of Hegemonic White Working-class Masculinities on the Screen, Page, and Stage’ (PhD in Creative Writing)
• 'Adapting Shakespearean Tragedy into Arab Theatre: A Critical Comparative Edition of Sulayman Al-Bassams's An Arab Tragedy' (PhD in English Literature)
• 'Understanding the Anishinaabe worldview in the Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich' (PhD in English Literature)
• 'The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Language, Subjectivity and Animal/Human Boundaries' (PhD in English Literature)
• 'Global Tourism and Subjectivity in the Writing of Jan Morris' (MA by Research in English Literature)
• 'Maternal Care and the Breast in Literature of the Long Eighteenth-Century' (MA by Research in English Literature)

• American literature, particularly pre-1900
• Literature and transatlanticism
• African American Literature
• Native American literature
• Literature, place and the environment