Dr Finn Fordham

Finn Fordham took a first in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, funded by the British Academy, went on to write a doctoral thesis at Birkbeck College with Steven Connor. The publication of his thesis was blocked by the James Joyce Estate. After a year teaching at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, however, he became a research fellow at University College Northampton and then secured a Special Research Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust to carry out research into Textual Genetics and Modernism. He became lecturer in 20th Century Literature at Nottingham in 2003 where he secured funding from the AHRC leave scheme.  In January 2008 he moved to Royal Holloway where he became a Reader from April 2010.  He has been invited to present on his work at Universities in Oxford, Dublin, Prague, Trieste, Belgrade, Beijing, St Andrews, Aberystwyth and the School of Advanced Studies in London. He lives in Oxford, is married and has two children.

Fordham’s research is focused on James Joyce, Modernism and 20th Century writing, specialising in Finnegans Wake and genetic approaches to various texts. 

His most recent book, I do I undo I redo: the Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves, came out with Oxford University Press in 2010.  He has published widely in a range of journals and collections — on Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott, on Nabokov and Rushdie, on music, on DeLillo, Danielewski and Foster Wallace, and on Thomas Traherne.  He is currently working on a history of the arts in the years 1939-1940 and editing Finnegans Wake for Oxford World Classics (due out in 2012).

University of London Finnegans Wake Research Group