John Mullan Appointed Visiting Professor of English Literature at Gresham College

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Professor John Mullan as a Visiting Professor of English Literature.

His new lecture series on The Powers of the Novel will set classic novels against contemporary works, seeing what Daniel Defoe shares with Kazuo Ishiguro, or how Sarah Waters has learnt from Charlotte Bronte 

Mullan is also Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and has had a long career researching 18th and 19th-century literature. He is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who has published on Jane Austen (What Matters in Jane Austen?) and has just finished a book about Charles Dickens; he has also published widely on contemporary fiction.

Professor Mullan said: "How did the novel - that upstart literary form - come to dominate the literary marketplace?  How do novels seize and absorb the attention of their readers?

"In these three lectures for Gresham College I will look at the formal tricks and devices of modern literary fiction, used by writers like Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ian Rankin and Hilary Mantel, but also see how these reach back to the innovations of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists like Sterne, Austen and Dickens.

"It will, I hope, show that the bravest, strangest fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is still alive to readers – but also to writers.”

Dr Simon Thurley, Provost of Gresham College, said: “Professor John Mullan is a brilliant communicator and academic with a world-class reputation. We are delighted to have him bringing his wit and insight to talk about the novel at Gresham this year.”

Gresham College Professors have been giving free public lectures since 1597, within the City of London and beyond. Visiting Professor lecture series' supplement lectures by Gresham’s ten Professors; the College also hosts guest lectures from a range of illustrious speakers selected from the worlds of academia, the arts, law, medicine, politics and industry.

In 2020-21, Visiting Professor John Mullan will be lecturing on The Powers of the Novel: