Leadership team
Head of Department
Professor Vike Plock
I am the Head of Department for English and Creative Writing and a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture. I am the author of several books and of numerous articles and book chapters including Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (2010), Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers (2017) and The BBC German Service during the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy (2021).
Email: V.Plock@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Creative Writing
Professor Wendy O’Shea Meddour
I am the Director of Creative Writing in the Department of English and Creative Writing, as well as an internationally acclaimed children’s writer. My role is to steer the direction of our flourishing creative writing provision at Exeter. During your time here, you’ll encounter me in a variety of contexts, including lectures, seminars, supervisions, visiting speaker events, and creative writing dissertation meetings. You may also bump into me at literary events or giving readings in bookshops. If so, do come and say hello.
Director of Education
Professor Chloe Preedy
My research focuses mainly on early modern drama, although I am also interested in the prose and poetry of this period, the modern afterlives of Renaissance people, publications, and playhouses, and spatial questions in relation to modern drama. My first book, Marlowe's Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Arden, 2013), was awarded the Roma Gill Prize for the best new work in Marlowe studies.
Email: c.preedy@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Student Experience
Dr Peter Riley
Dr Peter Riley is an academic, writer, and broadcaster specialising in long nineteenth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, labor history and German American culture. He also writes non-fiction and is interested in the relationship between creative and critical prose.
His most recent book Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (Profile, 2022) won the Ideas Prize for Non-Fiction. It explores one of Britain’s most bizarre subcultures: each time a whale washes up on our shores, a fugitive community of human scavengers descends to claim its trophies. Some are driven by magical beliefs; some are motivated by profit. For others, the need is much stranger. Mixing natural history, memoir, conspiracy theory, politics, and gore, Strandings was described by Iain Sinclair as “a brave, reckless and engaging performance”, by Philip Hoare as "wild and wonderful", and by Jean Sprackland as a “glorious rollercoaster of a book, whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage.” The book was recently featured as the cover story of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine, and adapted for BBC Radio 4.
Email: P.J.Riley@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Research
Professor Laura Salisbury
I am Professor in Modern Literature and Medical Humanities. I have research and teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language.
Email: l.a.salisbury@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Business, Engagement and Innovation
Professor Gabriella Giannachi
I am a Professor in Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technologies at the University of Exeter, which promotes advanced interdisciplinary research in creative technologies by facilitating collaborations between academics from a range of disciplines with cultural and creative organisations.
Email: g.giannachi@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Impact/UoA Co-ordinator
Professor Andrew McRae
Andrew McRae is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Department of English.
He has published widely on early modern English literature and culture. He was the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded ‘Stuart Successions Project’ and 'The Poly-Olbion Project', and led the development of Stuarts Online. In 2019 he co-directed Places of Poetry, a community arts project for England and Wales. With Philip Schwyzer, he is currently completing a scholarly edition, for Oxford University Press, of Poly-Olbion, the 15,000-line poem by Michael Drayton that was published with annotations by John Selden and maps by William Hole. He also continues to work on early modern political literature, and the literature of rural England.
Email: A.McRae@exeter.ac.uk
Co-Director of Global Engagement
Professor Tricia Zakreski
I am an Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture. My main research interests are women’s writing and women’s work and art and design history in the Victorian period. My current work explores the relationship between authorship and the decorative arts in the second half of the nineteenth century, and I am currently writing a monograph entitled Designing the Novel: Women’s Writing and the Decorative Arts.
Email: P.Zakreski@exeter.ac.uk
Co-Director of Global Engagement
Professor Natalie Pollard
Natalie's research specialisms are in multi-disciplinary approaches to contemporary writing and visual culture. She is an expert in Anglophone poetry and its connection with artistic practices, ecologies and entangled agencies. Natalie has just completed her third book, due out with Bloomsbury in 2025, on global climate imaginaries. She is the author of two published monographs: Fugitive Pieces: Poetry, Publishing and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the 21C (Oxford UP, 2020) and Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (OUP, 2012), and the editor of Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2014). She is also the director of Unhoming Pedagogies, a network which brings together global scholars and students to consider the potential for unmooring anthropocentric educational norms, colonial knowledge structures and power hierarchies, through practices that involve risk-taking and bewilderment, creative digression, environmental and multispecies collaboration.
Email: natalie.pollard@exeter.ac.uk
Director of Wellbeing, Inclusion, and Culture
Professor Jane Poyner
I work on the cross-over between art and visual culture and postcolonial studies. My current research is deepening my interests in environmental justice in literatures of the Global South. My teaching reflects all these interests, as well as World and postcolonial literatures, the environmental humanties, and urban studies.
Email: J.Poyner@exeter.ac.uk
