Kasia Boddy is a Senior Lecturer. She has an MA in Philosophy and English from Edinburgh and a PhD from Cambridge where she wrote a thesis on late twentieth-century American short fiction. She was appointed to UCL in 1994 and has also taught at the universities of Dundee and York. She contributes to UCL’s MA in Film Studies as well as to the Issues in Modern Culture MA within English, and she has supervised PhDs on a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and American authors and topics. She regularly writes about and reviews contemporary fiction for the Daily Telegraph.

Research

Kasia Boddy is currently completing a book on the American short story since 1950 and editing a special short fiction issue of Critical Quarterly. With Ali Smith and Sarah Wood, she recently co-edited Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, an anthology of stories about lovers’ quarrels. Her next project, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2009-10, is a study of the idea, as well as the history, of the Great American Novel. Since its launch in the 1860s, the Great American Novel (GAN) enterprise has proved more durable and more various than any other in American literary culture. It remains the benchmark for literary ambition, prestige, and sales. Already eminent during the early decades of the twentieth century (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein), the GAN has recently become pre-eminent (Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy). The question proposed is not so much ‘What was (and still is) the Great American Novel?’ as ‘Why the Great American Novel?’ Exactly what need (social, political, moral, commercial, aesthetic) does the idea serve? Exactly what purpose might its realisation fulfil, that so many writers should have put so much effort into realising it?

Kasia’s last book was Boxing: A Cultural History (2008), and she retains an interest in the relationship between sport and other forms of culture (literature, art, film), participating in the Sport in Modern Europe research group. She is also researching the Victorian cultural afterlife of John Shaw, a now-forgotten Waterloo hero, [Life Stories] and writing an article on urban flower pots. [The City]

Selected Publications

Book

Boxing: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2008), pp. 480

(Winner of the 2008 British Association of American Studies Book Award and the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History (awarded by The British Society of Sports History) and shortlisted for the National Sporting Club Best Sports Book Awards. See UCL on iTunes U.)

Edited Books

Introduction, and co-ed. with Ali Smith and Sarah Wood, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: Lovers’ Quarrels from Anton Chekhov to ZZ Packer (Penguin Classics, 2009).

Ed. with Introduction, Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Penguin Modern Classics, 2008).

Articles

‘Regular Lolitas? The Afterlives of an American Adolescent’, in Jay Prosser (ed.), American Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2008), pp.164-76.

‘Detachment, Compassion and Irritability: The Naturalism of Never Come Morning’, in Robert Ward (ed.), Critical Essays on Nelson Algren (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), pp.72-94.

'The Modern Beach', Critical Quarterly, 49, no.4 (December 2007), 21-38.