Goldsmiths - University of London

Professor Len Platt

Len Platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths. He was appointed Head of Goldsmiths Learning and Enhancement Unit in July 2011. Professor Platt has worked in adult education and widening participation since the 1980s, when he worked for the Workers Educational Association, the Extra Mural Studies department of the University of London and in Further Education. He has had a long association with the U3A and with other community organisations, including the Stephen Lawrence Trust. He played a leading local role in the provision of Access and developed in the late 1990s the part-time degree framework at Goldsmiths College, a flexible programme of study designed for part-time adult learners. He was Head of the Department of Professional and Community Education between 2005 and 2009 and currently chairs the College’s Programme Scrutiny Sub-Committee.

He has also written widely on modern literary culture, especially on the works of James Joyce and on ‘popular culture’ in various genres and technological forms. His particular interest is in the politics of texts and the ways culture performs in politically strategic ways.

His edited collection of essays Modernism and Race is currently in press with Cambridge University Press. A new introduction to James Joyce, Texts and Contexts is due for publication next year with Continuum.

Areas of supervision

Recent research students include —

Trevor Brent, Wyndham Lewis and the Body
Ahmed Masoud, Palestine and the Literature of Resistance
David Linton, West End Revue and National Identity

Grants & awards

With Dr Professor Dr Paul Nolte of the Freie Universität Berlin, ‘West End and Friedrichstraße: a comparative study of popular theatre in London and Berlin, 1890-1930’— (DFG/AHRC funded £262,000). This project runs from 2011-2013.

Conferences

Professor Platt will be speaking on West End and Berlin music theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin on Thursday December 8th, 2011 and March 29th 2012.

He will also be leading the Modernism Seminar at the School for Advanced Study, London on Feb 4th 2012 on the subject of Popular Modernism.

Selected publications

Monographs

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (2011) Continuum.

 

 

Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'  (2006) Cambridge University Press.

 

 

Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890-1939 (2004) Palgrave MacMillan.

 

Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century Literary Culture (2001) Greenwood Press.

 

Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: a Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (1998) Rodopi.

 

 

 

 

Recent essays

 

 

‘Aristocratic Comedy and Intellectual Satire’, vol. iv of the Oxford History of the Novel.

 

‘ “Unfallable encyclicing”: Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopaedia Britannica’, James Joyce Quarterly, 47/1, 2011.  

 

‘References to Madame Blavatsky and her ideas in the Wake’ – an annotated list’, James Joyce Quarterly, 45/2, 2009.‘

 

“Altogether better-bred looking” — race and romance in the Australian novels of Rosa Praed’, Journal of Australian Literature, 2008.

‘ “Our common cultural heritage” — classic novels and English television’ in Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson (eds.), Television and Criticism (Bristol: Intellect, 2008).

‘ “No such race”: the Wake and Aryanism’ in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (eds.), Joyce, Ireland and Britain (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).