Dr Will Norman

Will studied English at Nottingham University as an undergraduate and completed his DPhil at Oxford University before taking up his position at Kent. He was the Director of the Centre for American Studies from 2016-2020 and is currently Director of Studies for English in the School of Humanities.

Will has held fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. His research has also been funded by the British Academy and the Terra Foundation for American Art. He has held visiting research fellowships at Yale University and the University of Sydney. 

 Will has been Co Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of American Studies since 2023.

Will Norman’s research focuses primarily on US literature after World War Two in relation to its social, historical and political contexts.

He is currently researching the many writers, artists and creative workers employed by the US security agencies during and immediately after World War Two, asking how imaginative labour intersected with agency work in this period.

His previous research project on the idea of complicity in post-war American literature and thought explored how writers and thinkers in this period wrestled with the idea that they themselves bore responsibility for the problems they represented in their work. Complicity in American Literature After 1945: Liberalism, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2025) won the 2026 BAAS book prize. You can listen to him talking about complicity at the “Political Concepts” conference at Brown University in 2025 here.

Will’s second book, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) asked what happened to modernism after World War Two, using a transatlantic lens. It examines the wave of writers, artists and intellectuals who left Europe for the US in midcentury, showing how they responded to US mass culture, creating new forms and ideas while adapting to the American cultural landscape.

Will’s first book, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (Routledge, 2012) offered a revisionary reading of Nabokov’s English language fiction, interpreting his work against the grain of his public opinions to show how it responded to historical contexts such as the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, World War Two and the Cold War.

Will also has a longstanding interest in American crime fiction and has published articles in this field in a variety of venues, including most recently in the collection Los Angeles: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2026)    

ENGL5003 American Modernities: US Literature 1930 to the Present

ENGL6010 The Project

ENGL7507 American Literature in the Cold War Era

Will has supervised eleven PhDs to completion on a variety of topics related to his areas of research expertise, including American fiction, drama, poetry and graphic novels from the nineteenth century to the present.