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 Kate Montague
I am a Lecturer (E&S) in 20th/21st Century Literature, a post I have held since September 2020. My first monograph, Tragedy, Affect, and Labor in American Literature, 1945-2020, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and is due to be published in 2025. This book examines a collection of postwar literary works and interrogates how the emergence of immaterial labor as the major form of waged work in the period—from creative and reproductive, through service and sex, to unemployment and new kinds of managerialism—is mediated into literary form as tragedy.
Email: k.montague@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
Professor Jana Funke
I am Professor of Modern Literature and Sexuality Studies. My research focuses on modernist literature and culture, the history of sexuality, sexual science and medicine, and queer/feminist studies. I have recently co-edited (with Dr Elizabeth English and Dr Sarah Parker) a new edited collection entitled Interrogating Lesbian Modernisms: Histories, Forms, Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and have completed (with Dr Hannah Roche) the first-ever critical edition of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Email: J.Funke@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
Dr Arun Sood
I am a Lecturer in Global Pre-1800 Literatures. My research and creative practice is underpinned by varied interests including the intersections between postcolonial and environmental writing, oral cultures, sound, practice research, the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and cultural memory studies.
Email: A.Sood@exeter.ac.uk
Department Manager
