Professor Simon Rennie

I am an Associate Professor of Victorian Poetry. I have a specific interest in working-class and politically engaged poetry of the mid-nineteenth century. My previous research has culminated in the monograph The Poetry of Ernest Jones: Myth, Song, and the 'Mighty Mind' (Routledge, 2016), with a second monograph entitled Cotton Famine Poetry: Unheard Voices on a Global Crisis being published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025. I have published three volumes of original poetry, Little Machines (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2009), Unless Otherwise Stated (KFSP, 2011), and Adverse Camber (2019). I also have an interest in the works of Anthony Burgess and I have broadcast on that subject.

Between 2107 and 2019 I was Principal Investigator on a large-scale AHRC-funded project collecting and studying Lancashire Cotton Famine poetry published between 1861 and 1865. The project involved several public events and has created a publically accessible database housing hundreds of poems written about the global social effects of the American Civil War. My subsequent research is in the area of Victorian local newspaper poetry and the opportunity it afforded ordinary people to comment on contemporary political events.

I am currently supervising PhD projects on subjects including Cotton Famine poetry, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962), twentieth-century working-class fiction, and Arab-American spoken word poetry. I welcome interest from students considering postgraduate projects on related subjects or general poetic subjects.

Between July 2020 and June 2023 I was Director of Online Learning for the College of Humanities, leading efforts to adapt teaching during the Covid pandemic's restrictions. From the summer of 2024 I have taken the role of Marketing and Communications Officer for the Department of English and Creative Writing. I am also the current Chair of the Exeter Centre for Victorian Studies.

Research supervision:

I am open to discussing supervision of research projects realted to my academic expertise. I would be particularly interested in propsals related to the following subjects:

Victorian poetry

Political poetry

Working-class literature

Anthony Burgess