School of English

Professor Jan Montefiore

Professor Director of Learning and Teaching
Director, Centre for Sexuality, Gender & Writing
Phone: 01227 823044 Office: NC 2
Email: j.e.montefiore@kent.ac.uk  

Interests

I have a long-standing interest in poetry and gender, the theme of my book Feminism and Poetry, now in its 3rd edition (2004), of several essays in my book Arguments of Heart and Mind (2004).  Gender and writing in the mid-twentieth century is also the theme of  my study Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), and of my current research on the life of  the critic Q.D.Leavis. I am Director of the Kent Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing, which has hosted colloquiums on ‘Schooling’, ‘Early Modern Bodies’ and ‘Spinning Tales’, as well as poetry readings by Marilyn Hacker and (with the Centre for Creative Writing[2]) Carole Satyamurti and Jackie Kay. I am also a Kipling scholar. My book 'Rudyard Kipling' (2007) was launched at an international conference on Kipling at Kent which I organised.  I am organising  a second conference with Dr Kaori Nagai on 'Rudyard Kipling: An International Writer', to be held at the Institute of English Studies in London. I have edited Kipling's 'The Man Who Would be King and other stories'(2011) for Penguin Classics and am series editor of their other Kipling titles, and I am editor of and contributor to the forthcoming book 'In Time's Eye: essays on Rudyard Kipling'.

I am also interested in creative writing, especially poetry which I teach on two undergraduate modules  at Stages 1 and 3, and have published in several magazines including PN Review and the TLS. I have recently completed 'Shaping Spirits', a sequence of  sonnets centring on childhood and schooling, several of which have appeared in the periodical The Literary Imagination.

Research Supervision

I am happy to supervise and discuss research in any of the above areas. I already supervise and co-supervise students working on the poetry of Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and A.S. Byatt. I particularly welcome students working on gender and poetry, on gender and mid-twentieth-century writing, on Kipling and on Englishness.

Professional Activities

I am a member of the W.H. Auden Society, the Kipling Society and the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. I am consultant on women’s poetry and poetics for Liverpool University Press, and a member of the editorial board of the US-based journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. I served on the AHRC postgraduate panel for English 2004-7, and am currently one of its Peer Review College.

RUDYARD KIPLING: AN INTERNATIONAL WRITER: International conference - October 21-22, 2011

Selected Publications

Books:

Rudyard Kipling 'The Man Who Would be King and other stories' edited and introduced by Jan Montefiore, Penguin  Classics, 2011. Series editor for Kipling titles published by Penguin Classics in 2011: 'Plain Tales from the Hills' ed. Kaori Nagai, Just-So Stories ed. Judith Plotz, 'Kim' ed. Harish Trivedi, and the forthcoming 'Jungle Books' ed. Kaori Nagai.

Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing (1987; 3rd edition revised and enlarged, Rivers Oram Pandora, 2004)

Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (Routledge, 1996)

Arguments of Heart and Mind: Selected Essays 1978-2000 (Manchester University  Press, 2002)

Rudyard Kipling (Northcote House ‘Writers and Their Work’, 2007).

Introduction to Rudyard Kipling Something of Myself, Wordsworth Classics, 2008.

Guest Editor:

 Paragraph 21.3 (1998), special issue on ‘Maternity’.

(with Nicky Hallett) Journal of European Studies (125-6, 2002), special issue on ‘Lives and Letters’.

(with David Page) Supplementary issue of Kipling Journal no.325 (March 2008) publishing selected papers from the September 2007 Kipling conference: April 2008 (forthcoming)

Some Recent Chapters and Articles

‘Englands Ancient and Modern: the wartime fictions of Sylvia Townsend Warner and T.H.White in T.H.White (ed. Gill Davies), Edwin Mellen Press 2008 (forthcoming)

‘Q.D.Leavis: a conversation’: interview with Kate Varney, daughter of F.R. and Q.D.Leavis in Women: a cultural review, summer 2008 (forthcoming)

 ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and the biographer’s moral sense’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2003

 

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 823054

Last Updated: 20/07/2011