Career Details

Brian studied for his undergraduate degree in English and American Literature at the University of Warwick, took an MA in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool, in postwar American dystopian science fiction. He taught literature and film at NEWI in Wrexham and at the University of Chester before moving to Lancaster in September 2006.

He has published, with John H. Cartwright, Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2005), which offers a broad overview of the relationship between literature and science from the early modern period to contemporary literature and culture; and Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), which encompasses the genres of science fiction, spy fictions, film noir and detective fictions, and the Western, to investigate constructions of masculinity in the post-war period. A seond monograph on masculinities, Contemporary Masculinities in fiction, film and television, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.

A monograph on the contemporary London writer Iain Sinclair was published as part of Manchester University Press's Contemporary British Novelists series in 2007. Brian has also edited a collection of essays on screen adaptations of literature, Textual Revisions, which was published by the Chester Academic Press in 2009, and written the Reader's Guide to Essential Criticsm: Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2014).

Brian has supervised research students in the Gothic, fantasy fictions, graphic novels and spatiality, the post-war American short story, epic fantasy, Post-war American literature and culture, and bio-technological science fiction. He would welcome applications for research projects on twentieth-century American fiction and film in general, but in particular science fiction, gender (especially masculinity) in film, city fictions, and critical/creative and creative writing projects.