Olivia Sutherland

Thesis title: The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel 

Supervisor: Professor Peter Boxall

Research interests: modern and contemporary literature; the novel; temporality; futurity; problems of contemporaneity; allusion, intertextuality and citation; autofiction; film; critical theory.

Teaching: I am currently supervising undergraduate dissertations on late-twentieth century Gothic fiction and New Journalism. I have devised and taught a module on Literature in English 1910–present day to visiting students at Mansfield College, and I am a graduate teaching assistant for Paper 6: Film Criticism. I am currently the primary supervisor for a visiting masters student undertaking a year abroad at Oxford, and who is working on Shirley Jackson. I am open to teaching opportunities across a range of papers, especially in the period 1910-present. 

Doctoral Research: My research focuses on the Anglophone novel's response to problems of futurity in the twenty-first century. I identify literary allusion as an old technique used by a range of contemporary novelists in an innovative way. In this mode, allusion to other texts can re-situate us in textual traditions with which we have lost meaningful contact, and thus grant us a language of shared intertexts, with which we might articulate our speculations, predictions and dreams of the future. I call such allusion ‘vatic’, or prophetic, a term repurposed from poetry criticism. My doctoral thesis tracks permutations of the vatic across a transatlantic range of novelists, including Claire-Louise Bennett, Ben Lerner, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and Ali Smith.

Conference Papers: 

‘Under the Sign of Cliché: A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse…’, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP 15), CUNY Graduate Centre, NY (19/10/24)

‘Turn, Turn, Turn?: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Figuring the Future in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas’, Modern and Contemporary Literature Graduate Forum, University of Oxford (1/5/24)

‘“an unwinding of America”: Pastiche, Counterfactual and Narrative Pedagogy in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad’, International Society for the Study of Narrative (Narrative 2024), University of Newcastle (19/4/24) 

‘“Not the Outside Past”: The Fugitive Time of Literature in Claire Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19’, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP 14), University of Washington, WA (7/10/23)

‘The Vatic Mode: An Introduction’, Media, Arts and Humanities Graduate Seminar, University of Sussex (31/10/22)

‘“What if I made you /Hear this with your hands?”: A Hauntological Reading of Ben Lerner’s 10:04’, Graduate Symposium for American Literature, University of Cambridge (7/5/22)