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
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
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 John Plunkett
I am an Associate Professor of Victorian Media in ECW. My research interests are in nineteenth-century visual culture and popular shows and devices such as the panorama, diorama and magic lantern. I also currently lead the Digital Cultures minor pathway degree programme. I have held grants from the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, Yale Centre for British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library to support my research. Much of my work at Exeter draws on the rich resources of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, a public museum and research centre covering the long history of the moving-image.
I have greatly enjoyed collaborating with creative practitioners and heritage institutions on co-curated projects, which have taken forward my research and reached broader audiences. I have worked with the choreographer Lea Anderson MBE, a Collaborative Doctoral Award with Kensington Palace, and public engagement events with RAMM, Ilfracombe Museum and Positive Lights Community Arts (Exeter).
Email: J.Plunkett@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
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
