Howard Booth

I came to Manchester in 2000, having previously held lectureships at the University of Kent (where I was a postgraduate) and Birkbeck, University of London.

The information on this system of doctoral theses supervised is very incomplete - see under 'Opportunities' for a list of the doctoral students I have supervised and their topics.

Research

I am the General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E.M. Forster in eight volumes. British Writing from Empire to Brexit: Writing, Identity and Nation, co-authored with Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassoupolos, is forthcoming from Routledge in February 2025.

My critical writing has three broad themes which often appear in combination: modernism, colonialism and the post-colonial; the arts and English radicalism; and masculinity and male sexual identity. 

Modernism and empire

Modernism and Empire, co-edited with Nigel Rigby (Manchester UP, 2000) helped pioneer this field. 

Authors I've written on under this heading - in addition to Forster, Lawrence and Kipling - include Claude McKay, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Robert Byron, often with an interest in gender and sexuality. 

My contribution to British Writing from Empire to Brexit: Writing, Identity and Nation,  authored with Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassopoulos, and published by Routledge in 2025, includes my 35000 word discussion of Britain, identity, and the writing of the late colonial period. I've an article on South Africa's role in inaugerating Anglophone modernism in South African Modernisms: A Critical History, ed. Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

D.H. Lawrence

I am currently completing a book on Lawrence and politics.

I’ve written some twenty articles and chapters on Lawrence. I am on the editorial board of the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies and the reading committee for Etudes Lawrenciennes. New D.H. Lawrence (Manchester UP, 2009), which I edited, utilises current and new approaches in English Studies. 

Writing on Lawrence in recent years includes a chapter entitled 'Nature, Transformation, and the Frankfurt School in D. H. Lawrence’s Late Fiction' in Terry Gifford's collection Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Ediniburgh UP, forthcoming 2025) and an article on early Lawrence, mourning and creativity in the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies (2022). 

E.M. Forster

In addition to my work on the CUP edition for Forster’s fiction, for which I am editing Maurice, I have written a number of chapters and articles that address his work. These include the chapter on Maurice in The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster (Cambridge UP, 2007), a chapter on Maurice and David Galgut’s Forster biofiction Arctic Summer in a volume of essays on Maurice edited by Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (Liverpool UP, 2020), an article on Forster in The Cambridge Quarterly (2021), and a chapter in an anniversary collection edited by Harish Trivedi, 100 Years of A Passage to India (2024).

My next monograph after the one on Lawrence and politics is on Forster. It is provisionally entitled E.M. Forster's Families: Going Beyond the Normative.

Rudyard Kipling

My work on Rudyard Kipling includes editing The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (CUP, 2011). I am on the reviewing board for The Kipling Journal, and was a plenary speaker at the ‘Kipling in Europe’ conference in Bologna in September 2016.

John Addington Symonds

I have authored articles, chapters and reviews on the Victorian cultural critic and pioneering writer on sexuality, John Addington Symonds. I was a plenary speaker at the ‘(Re)reading Symonds’ conference at Keele University in September 2010, which was subsequently published in English Studies in 2013. 

See 'overview'.

I welcome enquiries about PhD supervision in the areas in which I work. The following is a list of current and past supervisees:

Completed: Aimillia Rohd Mamli, North Africa in Victorian writing; Andrew Frayn, fiction about the First World War; Burcu Alkan (with Terry Eagleton), Turkish Literature of the 1970s; Letizia Alterno, Raja Rao (with Anastasia Valassopoulos); Creina Mansfield (Creative Writing PhD, with Ian McGuire), Graham Greene and The Quiet American; Ian Pople (creative Writing PhD, with John McAuliffe), Roy Fisher and mysticism; Jade Munslow Ong, Olive Schreiner and the Modern; Matt Whittle, responses to mass immigration in post-war British writing; Gemma Moss, modernism and music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner; Susan Kinnear, New Zealand literature and modernity; Lucy Burns, Black Mountain College, poetry and the teaching of Creative Writing (with John McAuliffe); Laura Ryan, Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (with Douglas Field); Jo Jones, Lawrence, France and bisexuality (with Jerome Brillaud); Fay Winfield, on postcolonial approaches to TV adaptation (with Anastasia Valassopoulos); Emma Shaw, on modernism and walking (with Daniela Caselli); Billy Kahora, creative writing (with Ian McGuire and Kamila Shamsie); and Ziling Bai on Chinese translations of Virginia Woolf (with Anna Strowe in Translation Studies). In progress: Seerat Fatima (with Anastasia Valassopoulos), affect and the Partition of India in 1947; Thameena Alam (with Sundhya Walther) on utopian South Asian writing and experience; and Xinyi Xu (with Noelle Duckmann-Gallagher) on illness and the postcolonial in British and Chinese modernist writing.