Staff

Sub-Dean of Humanities
Julian Lovelock, BA East Anglia, PGCE Southampton.

Julian Lovelock is Sub-Dean of Humanities, with responsibility for English and Modern Foreign Languages. He was Headmaster of Akeley Wood School, Buckingham, between 1979 and 2005. His publications include, as editor, volumes in Macmillan's 'Casebook' series on Donne: Songs and Sonets, Milton: Comus and Samson Agonistes and (with A.E. Dyson) Milton: Paradise Lost. With A.E. Dyson he also edited Education and Democracy (Routledge) and wrote Masterful Images: English Poetry from Metaphysicals to Romantics (Macmillan). Most recently he edited The Head Speaks (University of Buckingham Press, 2008).

Head of the English Department
Gerry Loftus, BA (English, French, Latin) London, Cert (Education) London, MA (Applied Linguistics) Essex, MIL.

Gerry Loftus has taught EFL for over thirty years, including teacher training (TEFL) in Sweden and Germany. He has been at Buckingham since 1983 and is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for English Language Studies (EFL) undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. His particular academic interests are idiomatic English, media discourse and early literacy.

Richard Adamson, BA (Hons) Politics & Modern History (Manchester), Cert. Specialist Studies for Journalists (Manchester).

In a Fleet Street career spanning more than 25 years, Richard Adamson has worked as sub-editor and writer for wide range of national newspapers across the title spectrum including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Daily Mai, The Independent, Sunday Times, Sunday Mirror Magazine, Daily Express, News of the World and Daily Star. He has also worked as a TV reporter for a range of ITV companies including London Tonight, Granada, Central and London Weekend Television.

He was a Visiting Lecturer at Westminster University from 2000 to 2008 and is currently a Visiting Lecturer and Examiner in Public Affairs for the National Council for the Training of Journalists at Lambeth College, London. Additionally, he has for many years been an editorial consultant (design and content) to Camden Journal Newspapers, North London, and the News Sabah Times Group in Malaysia.

The second edition of his biography, Bogota Bandit was published in 2006 and more recently he has been completing research for two forthcoming books - one based on a major health scandal investigation, and the other on a key uncovered episode in the American Civil War.

Bill Angus, BA English (Teesside), MA Literary Studies (Newcastle), PhD (Newcastle)

Bill Angus completed his doctorate at Newcastle University and has taught English Literature for seven years at various UK universities, including Newcastle upon Tyne, Hull and Birmingham. His main research interest at the moment is in the play-within-the-play, or 'metadrama' . Publications arising from this include articles for Notes and Queries, Drama and the Postmodern (Cambria Press, 2008), and Studies in English, 1500-1900 (Spring 2010). He is currently busy putting the finishing touches to his first monograph, entitled Suspect Devices: Metadrama in Shakespeare and Jonson.

Magnus Ankarsjo, PhD Gothenburg

Since coming over from Sweden in 2005, Magnus Ankarsjo has taught for various universities in England and Wales. His main field of expertise is the Romantic period, particularly William Blake. Magnus has published three books on Blake: his doctoral thesis Bring Me My Arrows of Desire: Gender Utopia in Blake's "The Four Zoas" (Gothenburg Studies in English 87, 2004), William Blake and Gender (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2006), and his most recent work William Blake and Religion: A New Critical Review (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2009). This deals with the progressive scholarship on Blake in the last few decades and the recent crucial findings about his religious background (Moravianism and Swedenborgianism). He also works with the Blake group at Nottingham Trent University. His part of the project is to pursue the links to Emanuel Swedenborg and Scandinavia. A monograph on this theme, provisionally entitled William Blake and Swedenborgian Swedes, is now under way.

Gary Bloom, BA Hons (English & Drama) Wales

Gary Bloom is a freelance sports journalist. He has worked in local radio, regional TV and national TV for the past twenty years. He is best known as a football commentator, but has worked in radio and TV newsrooms in Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham. He is still working for Sky TV and ITV as well as broadcast organisations around the world. He has been to the last five FIFA football World Cups and hopes to be in South Africa in 2010. He was appointed visiting lecturer in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Buckingham in October 2007.

Caroline Cushen, MEd (TEFL) Exeter, BA (Fine Art) Ravensbourne, Dip (TEFLA), Cert (TEFLA) RSA.

Caroline Cushen has taught EFL in many countries over the past 15 years, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Venezuela, (then) Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Since returning to the UK , she has worked at Exeter, Derby and Nottingham Universities. She joined the University of Buckingham as a full-time Lecturer on 24th September, 2001.

More information about Caroline can be found in the Directory of Experts.

John M L Drew, BA / MA Oxford, PhD London.

John Drew taught for two years as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Leon, Spain, before returning to the UK to work for the Association of Commonwealth Universities. He came to Buckingham in 1998. Recent publications include extensive work on the Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens , the co-editing of Volume 4 of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism , and an edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray , for Wordsworth Classics. John has recently published an acclaimed full-length study of Dickens the Journalist for Palgrave-Macmillan (2003), the first of its kind. He edited a short collection of Dickens's recently discovered 'blacking poems' (The Pride of Mankind, Hedge Sparrow Press, 2006) and working on a major project Dickens Journals Online to digitise and make available online over 40 volumes of Household Words and All the Year Round, the phenomenally popular Victorian magazines edited by Dickens between 1850 and 1870.

More information about John can be found in the Directory of Experts.

Stefan Hawlin, BA Hons, MA, DPhil (University of Oxford).

Stefan Hawlin taught for five years at the University of Oxford before coming to Buckingham in 1991. At St Catherine's College, Oxford, he was Lecturer in English Literature (1986-88) and the Research Associate of the College, and also British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (1988-1991). His publications include The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, volumes 7, 8 and 9 (OUP, 1998, 2001, 2004), and The Complete Critical Guide to Robert Browning (Routledge, 2002), as well as numerous papers in journals in the UK and the United States. He is on the Advisory Board of the American journal Victorian Poetry. His most recent publication is Volume 15 of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (OUP, 2009), an edition of Browning's last two books of verse, Parleyings (1887) and Asolando (1889).

For more information see either the British Academy website at http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/pdfdir/index.html (external link) or our Directory of Experts.

Clare Morris
Secretary to the Sub-Dean of Humanities

Clare Morris has had a varied career working as an Engineer in the Royal Air Force followed by various stints in Industrial Relations, Facilities Management and most recently working as a Clerk to the Governors in a Secondary School. She is a Chartered Engineer and has a Degree in Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautical Engineering from Glasgow University and an MBA from Strathclyde University.

David Paroissien, PhD UCLA.

David Paroissien is a distinguished 19th-Century scholar, with degrees from the Universities of Hull, New Mexico and California. He spent the majority of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 to 2001. Since 1983, he has worked tirelessly, and generously, as editor of Dickens Quarterly (the US equivalent of The Dickensian), and since 1997 has been general editor, with Susan Shatto, of the much-admired Companion series of monographs, contextualising and annotating each of Dickens's major works in unparalleled detail. He lives in Oxford - where he maintains good links with Trinity College, having directed the UMass summer program there during the 1990s - and is writing and editing more vigorously than ever. Most recent publications include A Companion to Charles Dickens (Blackwell-Wiley, 2008) and "Victims or vermin? Contradictions in Dickens's penal philosophy", forthcoming in Jan Alber (ed.), Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame (University of Toronto, 2009).

Roger Perkins, BA Liverpool, PGCE, RSA (Dip) TEFL

Roger Perkins is creative director at Seager UK and an experienced journalist and teacher. In the field of print publication he has been part of editorial teams on the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Punch and Birmingham Post. He became deputy editor of the Electronic Telegraph website in 1998 and subsequently international editor at Vizzavi and then editor of mobile content for T-Mobile UK. Before his career in journalism Roger taught in Algeria, Italy, Venezuela and Spain. His book reviews often appear in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven magazine.

Felicity Roberts-Holmes, DSD (Speech and Drama) Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Art Glasgow, BA (English and Dramatic Studies) Glasgow, PGCE Jordan Hill, IPA, CertTEFLA RSA.

Felicity Roberts-Holmes taught at an international preparatory school in Cambridgeshire, and at a boarding school in France. She has been teaching EFL at Buckingham since 1994, primarily ESP for Business and EAP study skills, but also English Language Studies (EFL) degree courses.

Alison Smith, BA (English & Philosophy) Keele, Dip (TEFLA) RSA, Diplome de Langue Française Toulouse, Certificado Aptitud Pedagogico Barcelona.

Alison Smith has been teaching English since 1974, mainly in Spain. She was Director of the Dublin School of English in Barcelona from 1988–1994. She then worked in ESADE. Since returning to the UK, she has taught at Milton Keynes College of Further Education and the University of Buckingham.

Tony Williams, MA, PhD London.

Tony Williams taught English in secondary schools from 1969 to 1997 when he took early retirement. From 1999 to 2006 he was Joint General Secretary of The International Dickens Fellowship and a Trustee of the Charles Dickens Museum in London. He is Associate Editor of The Dickensian and organises the London programme of events for the Dickens Fellowship, as well as being a frequent speaker on Dickensian topics both in the UK and overseas. He is currently a member of the group planning the programme for the celebrations in 2012 of the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. He has recently accepted an honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Buckingham to assist with work on Dickens Journals Online.