Responsibilities

Berthold is Professor of English and Director of MMU's Institute for Humanities and Social Science Research (IHSSR). (Please visit our website at www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk.)

Berthold teaches "Contemporary Cosmopolitan Fiction and Film" at MA level. His research specialisms include contemporary British Fiction, Scottish literature, masculinity and gender studies, representations of nationhood, globalisation studies and cosmopolitan theory. He is currently supervising PhD projects on Anthony Burgess; Hilary Mantel; cosmopolitan fictions (Mitchell, Coetzee, Bolaño); twenty-first-century metafiction; contemporary crime fiction (McNamee, Peace, Bolaño); and 'touch' in contemporary poetry.

Berthold is 2012 Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor of British Literature at the University of Connecticut.

Background

Berthold has an MA in English and Scandinavian Studies from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Germany and a PhD in modern Scottish literature from the University of Glasgow. He arrived at MMU in September 2004 from the University of Manchester where he lectured in post-1945 British literature and culture. He has also lectured at Dundee, Swansea, Glamorgan, Chemnitz (Germany) and Liverpool John Moores Universities.

Publications

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), ISBN 9780748638154, 214pp.

Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), ISBN 0748610006, 216pp.

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), ISBN 1840461349, 208pp.

The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), ISBN 9780748639182, 176pp.

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), ISBN 9780748623969, 424pp.

[co-edited with D. Lea] Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), ISBN 9042009764, 171pp.

(with E. Byrne and J. Mullaney) ‘Texting Obama: Politics/Poetics/Popular Culture’, special double issue of Comparative American Studies 10: 2-3 (2012).

(with D. Lea) ‘Literary Masculinities’, special issue of Men and Masculinities 4:4 (2002), ISSN 1097-184x.

‘Twenty-First-Century Fiction’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume VII: British and Irish Fiction since 1940, ed. by P. Boxall and B. Cheyette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, forthcoming).

‘Weltliteratur’ [in German], in Handbuch Kanon und Wertung, ed. by G. Rippl and S. Winko (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013, forthcoming).

‘Baffled Hopes and Bad Habits: Men, Marriage and Conformity in Queer Theory and Gay Representation’ , in Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. by S. Horlacher (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 209-18.

‘Queer Politics, Queer Theory, and the Future of “Identity”: Spiralling Out of Culture’ in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. by E. Rooney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 283-302.

‘Nervous Men, Mobile Nation: Masculinity and Psychopathology in Irvine Welsh’s Filth and Glue,’ in Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature, ed. by E. Bell and G. Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 121-45.

‘The Union and Jack: British Masculinities, Pomophobia and the Post-Nation’, in Across the Margins: Identity, Resistance and Minority Culture Throughout the British Archipelago, ed. by G. Norquay and G. Smyth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 83-98.

‘Getting World Going in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, in ‘Sense and the Senses in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy’ special journal issue of Senses and Society (with a foreword by J.-L. Nancy), ed. by M. Syrontinski (London: Berg, 2012, forthcoming).

‘Cosmo-Kitsch vs Cosmopoetics’, in ‘New British Writing’ special journal issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, ed. by P. Waugh and J. Hodgson (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012, forthcoming).

‘Tour du Monde: David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and the Cosmopolitan Imagination.’ College Literature 37:4 (2010), pp. 42-60.

‘Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.’ Modern Fiction Studies 54:2 (2008), pp. 378-97.

‘Cosmopolitan Scots.’ Scottish Studies Review 9:2 (2008), pp. 71-92.

‘The Walking Cure: Heimat, Masculinity and Mobile Narration in Alan Warner’s The Man Who Walks.’ Scottish Studies Review 7:1 (2006), pp. 95-109.

‘The Wounded Woman and the Parrot: Post-feminist Girlhood in Alan Warner’s The Sopranos and Bella Bathurst’s Special, Journal of Gender Studies 15:2 (2006), pp. 133-44.

‘Dams Burst: Devolving Gender in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory’, Ariel: Review of International English Literature 30:1 (1999), pp. 131-48.

‘Beyond (T)Race: Bildung and Proprioception in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34:1 (1999), pp. 159-68.

‘Emerging as the Others of Our Selves: Scottish Multiculturalism and the Challenge of the Body in Postcolonial Representation’, Scottish Literary Journal 25:1 (1998), pp. 54-72.

‘Herald of Hybridity: The Emancipation of Difference in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1 (1998), pp. 111-30.

‘A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition’, Scotlands 2:1 (1995), pp. 107-22.

Current work in progress:

(with E. Byrne) ‘Cosmopolitanism as Critical and Creative Practice’, inaugural special issue of the Open University’s Open Arts Journal (2012. forthcoming).

(with A. Karl and E. Johansen) 'Neoliberalism and the Novel, special journal issue.