Dr David Barnes
Departmental Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of English
Academic profile
About
Dr David Barnes studied English at Oxford as an undergraduate, then moved to London to work in journalism, before completing an MA and PhD at Queen Mary, University of London.
After completing his PhD, Dr Barnes was a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, before holding various teaching and research positions in Oxford. Dr Barnes has also held visiting research fellowships at the Harrison Institute, University of Virginia and Senate House Library, University of London. His doctoral research delved into the political and historical contexts of 19th and 20th century literary depictions of Venice. This work was later developed as his first monograph,The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics.
Dr Barnes is particularly interested in the role of cities in the modern cultural imaginary. His first book explored the ways in which the contested politics and history of Venice shaped a range of literary and cultural responses from 1800 to the present. Current research interests focus on two areas of interest. Urban Animals is a project focusing on the role of the animal in the modern city, and features a range of literary figures, from Dickens to Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker to T.S. Eliot.
A second area of interest lies in exploring a range of transatlantic cultural exchanges in the late 19th and early 20th century. It examines the ways in which ideologies of empire and race condition or determine the forms of exchange – literary and cultural – between Europe and the Americas.
Expertise
- America and Europe 19th-20th century
- Imperialism and literature
- Literature and animals
- Modernism/Modernist Literature
- Venice (modern history of, 1900-present)
- Writers: Henry James, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin
Selected publications
- H.G. Wells’s Urban Beasts (CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures, 2025)
- The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics 1800 to the Present (Routledge/Pickering and Chatto, 2014)
- '"Race against Race, Immutable": Pound’s Fascist Readings of Henry James' (Textual Practice journal 34.7, 2020)
- 'Canto 26'. In Readings in the Cantos Volume I, ed. Richard Parker (Liverpool University Press, 2018)
- 'Mexico, Revolution and Indigenous Politics in D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent' (Modern Fiction Studies 63.4, 2017)
- '"All the People in the Ring Together": Hemingway, Performance and the Politics of the Corrida de Toros' (Modernist Cultures 11.1, 2016)
- 'Introduction' to special issue on 'New Transatlanticisms' (Modernist Cultures 11.1, 2016)
- 'Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy' (Journal of Modern Literature 34.1, 2010)
Media experience
Dr David Barnes' writing has appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, The New World (formerly The New European) and Literary Hub. He also has experience writing for radio including Regarding the Pain of Others (as co-producer, BBC Radio 3/World Service 2021), which followed Susan Sontag and explored the ways in which attention might be paid (or not paid) to trauma and suffering. It examined representations of warzones, from the Napoleonic battlefields to Bosnia, Rwanda and Syria. The Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo (Between the Ears, BBC Radio 3, 2019), which Dr Barnes devised, wrote and presented, identified and interviewed experts on the history of the modern zoo, scripting a series of fragments of dialogue delivered by 'Shelley', a London zookeeper who maintained the animals during the Blitz. Previous writing for radio has involved collaborative work on the changing meanings of place and tradition. Weird England (BBC Radio 3, 2018) was a collaboration with four other writers (including Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Naomi Booth) to broadcast a series of creative meditations on our attention to place, tradition, and the stranger aspects of English identity.
Recent media work
- Deserted Beaches, Lost Souls: On the Beautiful Emptiness at the Heart of White Lotus (Literary Hub, 2025)
- (Essay) Entering the Whirlpool (on T.S. Eliot and HBO’s Succession, Dublin Review of Books, 2024)
- 'What Hemingway Means in the Twenty-First Century' (Literary Hub, 2023)
- How T.S. Eliot's Therapeutic Practice Produced The Waste Land (Literary Hub (2022)
- (Co-producer) Regarding the Pain of Others (Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3 (2021)/ The Documentary, BBC World Service (2021)
- Why British Tourists in Europe have Never Really Changed (The New European, 2020)
- (Writer, presenter & co-producer) The Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo (Between the Ears, BBC Radio 3, 2019)
- (Writer, creator, presenter & co-producer) Weird England (The Essay, BBC Radio 3, 2018)