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  • Claire Allen is currently a Senior Lecturer in English. Claire plays a full teaching and research role with experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels across the programme. She currently designs and delivers core modules at levels four, five, six, and seven as a dissertation and PhD supervisor.

    Claire earned her PhD in contemporary London literature at the University of Northampton in 2011. Claire has previously worked at Birmingham City University as an associate lecturer specialising in both Modern British Fiction and Children’s Literature as well as at the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Northampton. Claire is a Fellow of the HEA. She also runs the English podcast ‘Shelf Concerns’.

  • ​Claire’s research and teaching expertise lie within the areas of twentieth and twenty-first century British literature, but she teaches across the English programme on modules including American literature, critical theory, Romanticism, eighteenth century literature, and urban narratives. Claire won the STAR award for lecturer of the year for her faulty in 2020.

  • Claire has peer-reviewed research published by leading academic journals and publishers in her field, including an article in Literary London and chapters in edited collections published by Palgrave Macmillan, including on the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Will Self, and the postmodern techniques of Scottish author Alasdair Gray. She has also co-organised an international conference, ‘The Art of Punk’ in which she presented a paper which considered the punk poetry of John Cooper Clarke and the work of Patti Smith.  She is currently in the process of finalising a monograph entitled London Fiction at the Millennium: Beyond Postmodernism which considers new theoretical perspectives by which to approach London literature through an investigation of postmodernism, the post postmodern, feminist and postcolonial readings of literature at and around the turn of the twenty-first century.

    ​Claire is also working on a number of other projects, including focusing on representations of class in contemporary literature, and is co-organising  a conference on women writers and class to be held at the University of Northampton.

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Claire Allen’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.