Dr Kathleen Bell

Originally a Londoner, Kathleen has worked at De Montfort University since 1992. She came to DMU as a lecturer in English but in 2006 took on the role of programme leader for the new Creative Writing joint honours degree.  She has always written creatively but her creative writing had taken a back seat while she worked in English; now she has been able to change focus and use her experience as both a writer and an editor to encourage students to achieve their best.  At the same time she is developing her own work in both fiction and poetry and has read and performed her poetry and short stories at a range of venues.  She has been a featured poet reading at events in the Nottingham Poetry Series and the Leicester Shindig and has read short stories at Leicester’s Short Fuse event and Sheffield Hallam’s short-story conference, The Singer Not The Song.

Kathleen still teaches English on the third-year module The Working-Class in Film and Literature.  Meanwhile she is editing two novels which she has completed and is preparing a collection of poems for publication.

‘If/Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead’: forgiveness and the body in Auden’s post-conversion poems, in ed. Adrian Grafe, Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period (2008)

‘The Marriage-Hearse’ (in ed. Jonathan Taylor Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (2012)

Kathleen’s recent focus has been on writing poetry and fiction. Her short story “Wax” which she read at Sheffield Hallam’s Singer Not the Song conference in 2011, can be found on the Necessary Fiction website http://necessaryfiction.com/writerinres/Wax and two of her poems can be found on the Litter blog, which is associated with Leafe Press http://www.leafepress.com/litter3/bell01/bell.html Other work has recently appeared in Hearing Voices and is forthcoming in the Salt anthology Overheard.

Previous publications have been on W.H. Auden, working-class writing, twentieth-century poetry. Kathleen supervises postgraduate work (MAIS and M.Phil/Ph.D) in both English and Creative Writing. She writes poetry and fiction.

Creative Writing, Poetry, Working-class literature and film

• M.A. English Language and Literature, Oxford University
• Ph.D. English Literature (thesis on W.H. Auden) University of Reading
• P.G.C.E. English and Media Studies,  Institute of Education, University of London

Creative Writing BA (Hons)

• CREW 1000 Exploring Creative Writing
• CREW 2000 Writing and Context
• CREW 2001 Writing and Place
• CREW 3000 Portfolio

English BA (Hons)

• ENGL 3019 The Working-Class in Literature and Film

Humanities MA

M.Phil./PhD supervision

• Trustee of the East Midlands Book Awards

 

• Member of the National Association of Writers in Education
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

The Singer Not the Song: narration in the short story, Sheffield Hallam University 2011 (reading of short story “Wax”)

 

• Gemma Palmer (1st supervisor)
• Pam Thompson (2nd supervisor)
• Alex Plasatis (2nd supervisor)
• Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke (2nd supervisor)
• Nina Bennett (2nd supervisor)