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David Ian Paddy

Professor
English Language & Literature
Whittier College
United States of America

Biography

Born in Brussels, Belgium to British parents, Professor dAvid iAn pAddy was raised somewhere between southern England and the American Midwest (roughly in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean). This background experience wed to an undergraduate degree in interdisciplinary studies subsequently shaped all of his academic interests and approaches to teaching. As an undergraduate, he wrote a thesis on the burgeoning field of postmodernism as seen in the disciplines of art, literature, sociology and physics. His later dissertational work was on anxieties of national and imperial decline in the development of British literary postmodernism. Since then pAddy has acquired interests in black British literature and Celtic studies, in particular the language, literature and history of Wales. Over the years he has published essays on Angela Carter, Niall Griffiths, Jackie Kay and Jeff Noon, a chapter titled “Key Critical Concepts and Topics” for The Modernism Handbook (eds. Philip Tew and Alex Murray) for Continuum, as well as a co-authored piece with Seamus Lagan on chaos theory for the Journal of College Science Teaching. Of many conference presentations the most recent have been “At Home in the Dark: R. S. Thomas and Samuel Beckett” at the International Conference on Welsh Studies, University of Toronto and “Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-Imperialism in the Work of J. G. Ballard” at the International Conference on J. G. Ballard, University of East Anglia, Norwich. A revised version of the latter essay is scheduled to appear in Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer's volume, From Shanghai to Shepperton: Critical Essays on J. G. Ballard, for Palgrave Macmillan. The major project of the moment is The Empires of J. G. Ballard, a book-length study on Ballard’s approach to colonial, imperial, and geopolitical themes, to be published by Gylphi press.

Research Interest

Modern and Contemporary British Literature, British Studies, J. G. Ballard, Welsh Language and Literature, Black British Culture, Postmodernism, Experimental Fiction, Critical Theory, and Science Fiction

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