Mapp, Dr Nigel
Telephone: 020 7911 5000 ext 2302
Email: N.Mapp@wmin.ac.uk
Postal: University of Westminster, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
Section: English Literature
Nigel Mapp was educated at the University of Manchester (BA Hons First Class English Language and Literature) and the University of Wales, Cardiff (PhD English). He has held research posts at the University of Newcastle and the University of Leeds. More recently he was a lecturer in English Philology at the University of Tampere, Finland, and a research fellow of the Academy of Finland (2006-10). He started in his permanent post at Westminster in August 2010.
Nigel has taught and supervised in a wide range of post-medieval English literature and literary theoretical topics. He is especially interested in the Early Modern and Romantic periods and in critical theory and philosophical aesthetics. His course design and research interests both reflect these emphases. Nigel’s research focus is genealogical, exploring Early Modern treatments of vision and matter as both sources of modern reasoning and vital sites of that reason’s contestation. That interest hopes therefore to link up with research on both the cognitive purport of more modern artworks and post-Romantic aesthetic thought more generally. Nigel’s publications include: William Empson: The Critical Achievement (1993) and Adorno and Literature (2006), volumes for which he was co-editor. A monograph, Paul de Man: Rhetoric, History, Aesthetics is forthcoming from Polity Press and another, Early Modern Disenchantments, is in preparation. Nigel’s writing currently concerns, mainly, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Cavendish, and Adam Smith, and examines aspects experience’s necessary embodiment – especially those raised by consideration of the media of artworks, verbal or non-verbal.
Nigel would welcome students needing supervision in any of these or related topics. He teaches on the BA modules English Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, and the Milton Special Author option. This year he is also offering occasional lectures on poetry and research methodology.
Selected Publications
Paul de Man: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, History (Cambridge: Polity 2011)
Joint editor (with David Cunningham), Adorno and Literature (London and New York: Continuum, 2006)
Joint editor (with Christopher Norris), William Empson: The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
‘The Obliteration of Vision: Marvell and the Authority of the Senses’, in Nely Keinänen and Maria Salenius (eds.), Authority of Expression in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 1–22.
Review: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses II. ‘Matters of Sense’, Radical Philosophy 142 (March/April 2007), pp. 42–5.
‘No Nature, No Nothing: Adorno, Beckett, Disenchantment’, in Cunningham and Mapp (eds.), Adorno and Literature, pp. 159–70.
‘History and the Sacred in de Man and Benjamin’, in Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (eds.), Between the Psyche and the Polis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 38–58.
‘Spectre and Impurity: History and the Transcendental in Derrida and Adorno’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds.), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 92–124. Reprinted in Christopher Norris and David Roden (eds.), Jacques Derrida, 4 vols. (London: Sage, 2002), vol. 1.
‘Deconstruction’, in Martin Coyle et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 777–90.
Essay-review: Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory. In Textual Practice 4:1 (Spring 1990), pp. 122–37.
Conference Activity
I have delivered around 40 papers in my career (including many invited ones), on varied literary and theoretical topics. Universities I have spoken at include: Cardiff, Cyprus, Essex, Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan, Melbourne, Newcastle, Sunderland, Tampere, Westminster and West of England. In 2009, I delivered a paper on ‘Benjamin and Mimesis’ at the IAPL conference at Brunel, and was also an invited plenary speaker for a conference on Paul de Man (‘De Man, Rousseau, and the Apotropaic’) held at University of California at Irvine in April 2009. In February 2010 I was invited to speak on ‘Herbert’s Concept of Life’ at the University of Edinburgh.
