Staff profile

Personal Details

My research interests are largely in the literary culture of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periods, especially late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction.

I have co-curated the following exhibitions at Palace Green Library: Outrageously Modern!' Avant-garde magazines 1884-1922, Robots! and Books for Boys: Heroism, Adventure & Empire at the Dawn of the First World War. I curated an exhibition of H. G. Wells books and manuscripts for the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, for Wells's 150th birthday in 2016. Summer 2017 will see an exhibition on time travel at Durham's Palace Green Library.

Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing was published by Anthem Press in 2003, the centenary year of Gissing's death. I have also published in The Gissing Journal and in four edited collections; I co-edited, with Christine Huguet, George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (Ashgate, 2013), and, with Pierre Coustillas, George Gissing's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

In 2012, OUP published my second monograph Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture, the first full-length study of H. G. Wells's aesthetics. I have also edited four H. G. Wells novels for Penguin. Until the 2016 issue, I am the editor of The Wellsian, the scholarly journal of the H. G. Wells Society. I have published with Nicholas Saul a collection of essays on literature and Darwin, The Evolution of Literature.

I have also completed articles on Victorian best-selling authors Marie Corelli and George du Maurier. I have edited Wells's The First Men in the Moon for World's Classics and am working on Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall for Oxford University Press's Collected Works of Evelyn Waugh. Current research also includes a monograph on the male bond in fin-de-siècle literature, an interdisciplinary project on time, memory and consciousness in Dickens, and an online edition of the states of The Time Machine.

During the academic years 2017-19, I was the Principal Investigator for the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education. A partnership between Arts Council England and Durham University, the Durham Commission investigated the benefits of teaching young people to be creative and to think creatively. The report can be read here

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Durham_Commission_on_Creativity_151019_0.pdf 

I am happy to supervise work on Victorian, Edwardian and contemporary fiction, on the fantastic and the Gothic, on masculinity and narrative theory. I will be on research leave 2020-21.

Teaching

I teach in most areas and periods offered by the Department, from Classical and Biblical Background to the Postwar Period. The largest parts of my teaching commitments are my undergraduate Special topic in Fin-de-Siecle Fiction and Taught MA Module Literary Masculinity at the Fin-de-Siecle. I have supervised or am supervising research students working on the Literature of the Fantastic, H. G. Wells, Decadence, Henry James, Victorian Children's Writing, Censorship and Robert Louis Stevenson.

• Victorian and Twentieth-Century Fiction, especially Fin-de-Siècle Literature, George Gissing, H.G.Wells, Evelyn Waugh
• Literature and Gender, especially masculinity in late-Victorian and Edwardian writing
• Literary Theory, especially Narrative Theory, Psychoanalysis and Gender; Theories of Pleasure
• Textual editing, including digital editing

• 2010: Christopherson-Knott Fellowship, Durham Institute of Advanced Study:

Authored book

• James, S. J. (2012). Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture. Oxford University Press
• James, S. J. (2003). Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing. Anthem Press

Book review

• James, S. J. (online). The Correspondence of H G Wells
• James, S. J. (2019). Review of 'Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press' by Will Tattersdill. Victorian popular fictions, 1(1),
• James, S. J. (2015). Review of Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author. By Robert L. Patten. Modern Language Review, 108(4), 1275-1276
• James, S. J. (2013). Review of Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Dickens quarterly, 30(2), 156-159
• James, S. J. (2010). Review of Keith Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies
• James, S. J. (2008). Review of Peter Edgerley Firchow, Modern Utopian Fictions

Chapter in book

• James, S. J. (in press). H. G. Wells’s London. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_74-1
• James, S. J. Island of Memory. In S. J. James (Ed.), Desert Island (10-13). Institute of Advanced Study
• James, S. J. (2022). Material matters: The surfaces of realist fiction. In S. E. Larsen, S. B. Jørgensen, & M. R. Higonnet (Eds.), Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives. Volume II: Pathways through realism (233-269). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.08jam
• James, S. J. (2016). Charles Dickens, Mental Time-Travelling and Autobiographical Memory. In C. Huguet, & P. Vita (Eds.), Unsettling Dickens: Process, Progress and Change (33-54). Éditions du Sagittaire
• James, S. J. (2015). 'Ugly Meanings in Beautiful Things': Reading the First Wilde Trial. In M. O'Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns (45-58). Pickering & Chatto
• James, S. J. (2014). Afterword. In The time machine by H. G. Wells ; with an introduction by Greg Bear and a new afterword by Simon J. James (119-128). Penguin Group (USA)
• James, S. J. (2014). Q is for Queen: The Reading Nation. In S. J. James (Ed.), Books for Boys : literacy, nation and the First World War (6-9). Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University
• Saul, N., & James, S. J. (2011). Introduction: The Evolution of Literature. In N. Saul, & S. J. James (Eds.), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures (9-18). Rodopi
• James, S. J. (2011). Realism and the Fiction of Modern Life: From Meredith to Forster. In P. Parrinder, & A. Gasiorek (Eds.), The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940 (87-102). Oxford University Press
• James, S. J. (2011). H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the End of Literature. In S. J. James, & N. Saul (Eds.), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures (113-123). Rodopi
• James, S. J. (2008). Fin-de-Cycle: Romance and the Real in The Wheels of Chance. In S. McLean (Ed.), H. G. Wells : interdisciplinary essays (34-48). Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• James, S. J. (2008). The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In D. Paroissien (Ed.), A companion to Charles Dickens (444-451). Blackwell
• James, S. J. (2005). In Public: George Gissing, Newspapers and the City. In J. Spiers (Ed.), Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late-Victorian England (189-188). Palgrave Macmillan
• James, S. J. (2005). 'The Discontents of Everyday Life: Civilization and the Pathology of Masculinity in The Whirlpool'. In M. Ryle, & J. Bourne Taylor (Eds.), George Gissing : voices of the unclassed (93-105). Ashgate Publishing
• James, S. J. (2005). Pip's counterfeit money: forgery in Great Expectations. In P. Knight, & J. Long (Eds.), Fakes and forgeries (41-49). Cambridge Scholars
• James, S. J. (2001). Experiments in Realism: How to Read a George Gissing Novel. In B. Postmus (Ed.), A Garland for Gissing (pp. 11-21). Rodopi
• James, S. J. (2000). 'George Gissing'. 'Demos'. 'In the Year of Jubilee'. 'The Odd Women'. In M. Drabble (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (6th ed.). Oxford University Press
• James, S. J. (1999). 'Pathological Comsumption: Commodities and the End of Culture in H G Wells' Tono-Bungay'. In J. Hallam, & N. Moody (Eds.), Consuming for Pleasure: Selected Essays on Popular Fiction (44-61). Liverpool John Moores University Press

Edited book

• James, S. J. (Ed.). Desert Island. Insitute of Advanced Study
• James, S. J. (Ed.). Decline and Fall. Oxford University Press
• James, S. J. (Ed.). Books for Boys: Literacy, Nation and the First World War. Insitute of Advanced Study
• Saul, N., & James, S. J. (Eds.). (2011). The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures. Rodopi
• Shapcott, J., & James, S. (Eds.). (2010). Some Versions of Realism: Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. Arnold Bennett Society
• James, S. J. (Ed.). (2005). H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly. Penguin
• James, S. J. (Ed.). (2005). H.G. Wells, Kipps. Penguin
• James, S. J. (Ed.). (2005). H.G. Wells, Love and Mr Lewisham. Penguin
• James, S. J. (Ed.). (2005). H.G. Wells, The New Machiavelli. Penguin
• James, S. J. (Ed.). (2004). George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Grayswood

Journal Article

• Easton, A., Horner, A. J., James, S. J., Kendal, J., Sutton, J., & Ainge, J. A. (2024). Context in memory is reconstructed, not encoded. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 167, Article 105934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105934
• Ward, S., James, S., James, K., Brown, C., Kokotsaki, D., & Wigham, J. (2023). The Benefits of Music Workshop Participation for Pupils’ Wellbeing and Social Capital: The In2 Music Project Evaluation. Arts Education Policy Review, 124(1), 37-47. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2021.1903640
• Hardey, M., & James, S. J. (2022). Digital Seriality and Narrative Branching: Season One, the Podcast Serial. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 19(1), 74-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2022.2029513
• James, S. J. (2018). Daily bread: food and drink in the Holmes canon. Critical Quarterly, 60(3), 5-13. https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12427
• James, S. J. (2016). The Worlds of H. G. Wells. Nature, 537, 162-164. https://doi.org/10.1038/537162a
• James, S. J., & Miller, E. V. (2016). A Body Undressed for Text: Trilby in Parts. Feminist Theory, 17(1), 83-105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700115620862
• James, S. J. (2013). Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciousness: The Sorrows of Satan, Popular Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon. Journal of Victorian Culture, 18(1), 134-151. https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2012.740846
• James, S. J. (2012). Witnessing the End of the World: H. G. Wells's Educational Apocalypses. Literature and Theology, 26(4), 459-473. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frs052
• James, S. J. (2011). Research-Led Teaching?
• James, S. J. (2011). Teaching Gissing in the Twenty-first Century
• James, S. J. (2008). A Prophet Looking Backwards: H. G. Wells's Curriculum for the Future. English, 57(218), 107-124. https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efn010
• James, S. J. (2001). The Truth about Gissing: Reassessing the Literary Friendship of George Gissing and H.G. Wells. Wellsian (1976), 24, 2-21
• James, S. J. (1997). Negotiating The Whirlpool

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• James, S. J. (2016). We should remember HG Wells for his social predictions, not just his scientific ones. The Conversation

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• James, S. J. H. G. Wells, Time Traveller: An Online Exhibition
• James, S. J. Ghosts and Dickens
• James, S. J. In conversation with Professor Simon James
• James, S. J. (in press). The Idea of a Planned World: H. G. Wells's 'The First Men in the Moon'
• James, S. J., & Walker, D. (1993). Sissinghurst

Other (Print)

• James, S. J. (2011). Science and Literature
• James, S. (2010). The Wells Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• James, S. J. (2002). Tell Me a Story: Lesley Glaister

Report

• James, S., Houston, A., Newton, L., Daniels, S., Morgan, N., Coho, W., Ruck, A., & Lucas, B. (2019). Durham Commission on Creativity and Education. Arts Council UK and Durham University

Scholarly Edition

• James, S. J. (2017). The First Men in the Moon