Staff

The Centre's core staff members are active researchers, publishing widely in their specialist areas within this interdisciplinary field.

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy - Director

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy is is the founding Director of the Centre for Suburban Studies, Reader in English and Creative Writing at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Before joining Kingston in September 2000, Vesna worked as a producer for the BBC World Service and taught at British and US universities, including St Lawrence (New York) and Bucknell (Pennsylvania).

Vesna is currently studying representations of contemporary suburbia in fiction, film and the media. She has given plenary lectures and keynote speeches on contemporary suburbia at numerous international academic conferences and contributed to a range of factual programmes on suburbia on radio and television, including the BBC radio and TV channels, Channel Four, Sky TV and many others, as well as national and international press. Forthcoming keynote addresses include those at Architexture: Textual and Architectural Spaces conference at the University of Strathclyde, 15-17 April 2008, and at Home and Urbanity: Cultural Perspectives on Housing and Everyday Life at the University of Copenhagen, 30-31 October 2007. Vesna is on the advisory board of UCL's Successful Suburban Town Centres project. She has acted as a consultant on a range of suburb related issues for the media, PR and financial institutions. Recent consultancies include the BBC, TeamSpirit PR and Chesham Building Society.

Her book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale University Press, 1998) has been translated into four languages. Her memoir Chernobyl Strawberries was published in English (Atlantic) in March 2005. It was serialised in the Times and read by Vesna herself as Book of the Week on Radio Four. It has been translated into German, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Serbian and has been a bestseller in several European countries. Vesna's work has also appeared in books published by MIT Press, Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Manchester UP, Macmillan, Routledge, Anthem Press, and a range of European editions.

She is currently preparing Defining Suburban Studies: The Syntax of Suburban Space, a volume to be jointly edited with Dr Laura Vaughan, Lecturer in Architecture at UCL, which will set the agenda for suburban studies as a new interdisciplinary field. It will bring together leading theorists and practitioners - architects, planners, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians, literary and media scholars - and establish a new methodology and intellectual framework for conducting suburban studies. She is also developing and mapping a two-volume cultural history of the English Suburb, to be edited with Gail Cunningham and David Kynaston. She is currently supervising PhDs in British life writing and the family and British and North American representations of suburbia in gay fiction.

Selected publications (books):

• Writing Worlds 1: The Norwich Exchanges, Norwich: Pen & Inc Press, April 2006. ISBN 1902913264
• Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir, London: Atlantic, March 2005. pp. 290, ISBN 1843544148
• Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1998, ISBN 0300073127

Selected publications (articles):

• "The Love that Dares not Speak its Name: Englishness and Suburbia" in: David Rogers, John MacLeod (eds.), Revisions of Englishness, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005, pp. 95-106.
• "The Balkans in Nineteenth Century British Travel Writing", in: Tim Youngs (ed.), Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces, London: Anthem Press, 2006, pp. 19-36.
• "Der Imperialismus der Imagination: Konstruktionen von Europa und dem Balkan" in: Karl Kaser, Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, Robert Pichler (ed), Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2004, pp. 229-263.
• "Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanisation" in: Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA: 2002), pp.25-38. Reissued in English in Eurozine (Vienna). Translated into Bosnian (Sarajevo Notebooks, Sarajevo 2003), Serbian (Beogradski Krug, Belgrade 2003), and Bulgarian (Sofia: Trud 2004). MIT paperback published in 2004.

Dr Martin Dines - Lecturer in English Literature

Dr Martin Dines' research interests are in cultural representations of British and North American suburbia, particularly in relation to the production of national, sexual and ethnic identities.

His monograph, Gay Suburban Narratives in British and American Film and Fiction: Homecoming Queens (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), explores how suburban environments have helped precipitate modern notions of gay identity and, equally, how they have become crucial sites with which contemporary writers and directors have begun to reassess and negotiate gay identity and their own relationship with the mainstream.

Recent and forthcoming conference papers, journal articles and book chapters examine the suburban fictions of various authors, including Dennis Cooper, Oscar Moore, Douglas Coupland and Jeffrey Eugenides. He is currently working on the relationship between suburbia, narrative and identity in the writing of North American 'white ethnic' authors.