Randall Stevenson

Emeritus Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature

Biography

Background

Professor Randall Stevenson was born in the north of Scotland, grew up in Glasgow, and studied at the University of Edinburgh (astrophysics, then English Literature) and the University of Oxford.

After working for a time in a government college in North-West Nigeria, he returned to the Department of English Literature in the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in 1979.

He has also worked as Associate Director of the University’s International Office, and as Dean of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, and has lectured abroad, often for the British Council, in a dozen European countries and in Korea, Egypt and Nigeria. His work has been translated into Italian and Russian, and new editions of critical studies published in Romania and in China.

Past PhD students supervised

Maxim Shadurski - Utopia and National Identity

Niklas Salmose - Nostalgia in Modern Literature

Benedict Jones-Williams - Museology and Modernist Fiction

Cat Schaupp -- Literature and the Great War

Nina Engelhardt - Mathematics and Literature

Colette Tulin Osgun - Scottish Theatre since 1970

Research summary

These are centred on twentieth-century literature, and on the historical processes and pressures of modernity which shape it.

Research and publication particularly focus on modernism; the literature of the Great War; narrative theory, especially in relation to issues of temporality and structure; fiction and drama in Britain throughout the C20th century; postmodernist fiction; Scottish theatre after 1950; literature and science.

As Professor Stevenson is now part-retired from the university , he is unlikely to be able to undertake further PhD supervisions except possibly as a second supervisor.

Project activity

Current projects include general editorship of the ten-volume Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain, which began publication in 2010.

View all 21 publications on Research Explorer

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