Adam Piette

I am Professor of Modern Literature at the School of English, University of Sheffield, and have worked at the Universities of Glasgow, Lausanne, Geneva, Paris XIII.

My primary research is in war studies, with two monographs on Second World War and Cold War texts and culture. My current work concentrates on the construction of Europe during the Cold War, and the legacy of the Cold War post-1989 in terms of militarisation, globalised technology and secret state / warfare state international relations as represented in the new cultural ‘wars’. of the late 20th and 21st centuries.

I have researched and published three monographs, two of which are on war studies: Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945 (Macmillan, 1995) and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), the research for which was enabled by a 3-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

I have also co-edited (with Mark Rawlinson) The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth- Century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), a 590 page collection of 57 essays on war writing and war culture in the 20th century. It includes three introductions by myself and the article ‘The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam’

Relevant publications

• ‘Keith Douglas and the Poetry of the Second World War’, for The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008): 117-130.

• “Activist Poetics in the Cold War: Grace Paley, Denise Levertov”, PN Review 36.4 (March-April 2010): 59-63.

• “Contesting Realms of Memory in Early Cold War France: Tulle, Oradour and Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting”, Theory, Culture and Society 27. 5 (2010): 86-106.

• “Bernard Spencer’s Wars”, Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, ed. Peter Robinson (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012), 88-103. ISBN 9781848612549

• ‘Postwar Espionage Fiction: Memory and Fascism in Emergency-State Thinking’, submitted, to be published in Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Literature and Film, 1943 to the present, ed. Petra Rau (Northwestern UP, 2014)