Professor Mark Steven

I am an Associate Professor of Literature and Film.

As a researcher, writer, and teacher, I tend to be interested in the poetics of social transformation. My thinking is especially alive to questions of how literature and cinema might help us envisage or even engineer a better world than the dumpster fire we now inhabit.

My most recent book, Class War: A Literary History, was published by Verso in May 2023. This book weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat in a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history. You can read an excerpt from its postscript here. This book has enjoyed a good deal of press, but I especially like this interview.

I am currently writing a book about the ways cinema shapes how we understand class belonging and class struggle today, and another about the superabundance of horror within the modernist literary imagination. 

I am the author of two other books, one on poetry and the other on horrror films: Red Modernism and Splatter Capital.

I am editor of Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism and am co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos and Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

My writing has appeared in Post45, Commune, Jacobin, Counterpunch, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, SubStance, Screen, Film-Philosophy, Screening the Past, Postmodern Culture, Affirmations, James Joyce Quarterly, and elsewhere. Sometimes I write poems.

I joined the University of Exeter in January 2018. My former life was in Australia, where I was the first member of my family to finish school let alone go to university. I got my start at teaching in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I was then employed as a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, specializing in modernist and world cinemas.