Iris Pearson completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Oxford in August 2024. The project was supervised by Professor Kate McLoughlin and examined by Professor Peter Boxall and Dr Doug Battersby.

Her doctoral research looked at the ways in which late twentieth-century novelists such as Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter deploy experimental formal devices to manufacture readerly affect. She is in the process of converting the thesis into a monograph, which will also include chapters on the contemporary novelists Ali Smith and Max Porter.

Other research interests, beyond the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel, include magical realism, experimental / creative reading practices, Spanish American literature and Japanese experimental prose. She is currently undertaking a Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Tokyo, working on a project entitled ‘Kanai Mieko and Mild Feeling’, which is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

For the past two years, Iris has been Research Assistant to Professor Joe Moshenska for his project ‘Creating Criticism’, creating an international network of scholars invested in the boundaries between and blurrings of creative and critical writing.

She is currently a Lecturer in English at University College and Lincoln College, teaching nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in English.

Contact: iris@irispearson.com or iris.pearson@ell.ox.ac.uk