Professor Jason Hall

Professor Jason Hall is a STEM-facing literary and cultural historian whose research and teaching engage with science and technology across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published several books and articles that explore poetry, fiction and material culture, particularly in relation to areas such as physiology, psychology, industrial manufacturing, astronomy and the Earth sciences. Currently Professor Hall is conducting research on views of the Earth in nineteenth-century literary and scientific texts, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (Jan. 2026-Jun. 2027). 

Biography:

Professor Hall has worked at Exeter since 2004. From 2014 until 2016, he served as inaugural head of the Department of Penryn Humanities, comprising the disciplines of History and English. He has also served as Associate Director of Exeter's International Institute for Cultural Enquiry (more recently the Societies and Cultures Institute). From 2023-25 he was co-chair (with Professor Daisy Hay) of the Department of English and Creative Writing's Athena Swan Self-Assessment Team, managing a team of 15+ academics, PS colleagues and students during an intensive evaluation process and drafting an application for a Bronze Departmental Award. For 10 years he was a Senior Academic Leader, providing career-development guidance for 10 colleagues across 2 campuses. Professor Hall has taught modules across the English literature curriculum, with particular focus on writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At Exeter and elsewhere, he has taught critical theory, media studies, academic writing, poetry, the sensation novel and adventure fiction. In the past, he has taught modules in the History Department, and occasionally he contributes to Exeter's Liberal Arts programme. Before coming to Exeter, Professor Hall taught in higher-education institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States. He holds a BA in English from Hendrix College, a small liberal arts college in his home state of Arkansas (pronounced AR-kan-saw), and a PhD in English from the University of London (Birkbeck College). Professor Hall has acted as external examiner for undergraduate English programmes at the unviersities of Lincoln, Cardiff and Durham (current), and he has examined several postgraduate theses.  

Research supervision:

Professor Hall welcomes enquiries from research students with interests in Victorian and twentieth-century literature, esp. poetry and sensation fiction; prosody and versification; history of science and technology.