Rory Hutchings

Rory is a part-time PhD Student based in the School of English. He gained his BA in English and MA in Literary Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus on modern literature. 

Rory has presented at multiple conferences on subjects including the gardens of Virginia Woolf, memoirs and testimonies of Guantanamo Bay, nonhuman imaginaries in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and hauntology in the work of Hilary Mantel. 

Rory’s current research focuses on the question of verminous animals in modernist literature. Authors of interest include Alfred Döblin, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Don Marquis, and Franz Kafka.  

• Vermin and literature
• Modernist cultures modernism and fascism 
• Modernism and “the masses” 
• Animal studies 
• Marxism and biopolitics 
• Hauntology 
• Horror literature and cinema  

PhD title

Bad Animals: Vermin, Health, and Modernist Literature 

The challenges of zoonotic disease are morally weighted, with the competing forces of contagion and hygiene posed as a battle between failure and progress. Vermin, animals which play a key role in transmission cycles, are figured as the noxious harbingers of disease and its accompanying physical and moral ills. Vermin are the ‘bad animals’. However, if the verminous body is the site at which normative moral and hygienic orders are determined, it might also be the place where bodily and social discipline can be challenged. 

This project will investigate the treatment of vermin in modernist literature and culture, considering both how modernist texts reflect contemporary ideas surrounding vermin, health, and hygiene and to what extent modernism adopts these disruptive creatures as an ethical and aesthetic strategy. 

Dr Derek Ryan