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Tom Sperlinger

Senior Teaching Fellow

Room: 1.12

Phone: 0117 954 6969

Email: tom.sperlinger@bristol.ac.uk

Office hours

I am normally in the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Research Interests

I have research interests in the nineteenth- and twentieth- century novel, poetry and story, and adult education. Authors of particular interest include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams, Frank O’Hara, Doris Lessing and Alice Munro. I am also interested in American Jewish fiction and in literature (of various kinds) related to Israel/Palestine. I have published articles and review-essays in a wide variety of journals, on pedagogic issues as well as literary ones. I have also written about literature, adult education and higher education policy for a wide variety of national and local media.

Teaching

I have extensive teaching experience at pre-undergraduate, undergraduate and MA level. On the BA English Literature and Community Engagement, I have taught a unit on critical thought and theory and various units on the theory and practice of community engagement (as it relates to literary study). I am currently teaching a new unit on nineteenth-century prose. I have taught on a variety of shorter part-time courses, including the Reading English Literature course and at external venues such as the Single Parent Action Network. On the BA English, I have been a tutor on the units Approaches to Poetry, Critical Issues and Literature IV (1850-1950).

With Richard Pettigrew, I am currently designing a new Foundation Year in the Arts and Humanities, which is due to launch in 2013 and which will provide an access route into all undergraduate programmes in the Faculty.

I have been responsible for the creation, initiation, development and overall management of a variety of programmes, including the part-time BA in English Literature and Community Engagement. I have a particular interest in developing short courses that facilitate progression at undergraduate and postgraduate level and/or that are designed to involve individuals and communities with limited prior experience of higher education. I have developed collaborative courses with external organisations including the Black Development Agency and the Eden House Project. From 2006 to 2009 I had similar responsibilities for a diverse programme of short courses in Classics, Historical Studies and Theology.

I have been at Bristol since 2004; before that, I taught on an Access course for Liverpool Hope University and in the Continuing Education Department at Liverpool University and I was reader-in-residence at Tate Liverpool (all in 2002-3).

Publications

Chapter in e-book:

• 'What kind of society values adult education?', in Ken Spours and Neal Lawson (editors), Education for the Good Society. London: Compass, 2011, pp.40-43; available online.

Articles:

• 'The invisibly university? Lifelong learning, literary study and the city of Bristol', Journal of Adult and Continuing Education (forthcoming 2012).
• (with Josie Billington) 'Where does literary study happen?', Teaching in Higher Education, special issue 'Leaving the academy', 16/5, 2011, pp.505-516.
• 'Literature and community engagement', AdLib: The Journal of Continuing Liberal Adult Education, 38, 2009, pp.23-26.
• 'Jane Austen's curiosity', Jane Austen Society Report for 2007, 2008, pp. 67-78.
• ‘“The sensitive author”: George Eliot’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 36/3, 2007, pp.250-272.
• ‘“A time capsule”: E.H. Gombrich and The Story of Art’, The Reader, 13, 2003; reproduced on the online Gombrich Archive.

Other publications:

I have published as a journalist in a variety of contexts. I contribute regularly to The Guardian and the Huffington Post on topics related to literature and adult education. I have also written for Left Foot Forward and contributed to a blog on education for Compass. I have published a comment piece on adult education in the Times Higher and interviews with A.B. Yehoshua and Doris Lessing in The Reader. I have reviewed fiction and literary criticism for the Independent on Sunday.

Review-essays:

• 'A writer without qualities: Recent work on Doris Lessing', Contemporary Women's Writing, 6/2 (2012) pp. 177-184.
• 'Going out to play', Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey, The History of Reading (2011), The Cambridge Quarterly, 40/2 (2011) pp.161-169.
• 'Doris Lessing's work of forgiveness', Doris Lessing, Alfred and Emily (2008), The Cambridge Quarterly, 38/1 (2009), pp. 66-72. 
• 'Quite argumentative', Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy (2007), The Cambridge Quarterly, 37/2 (2008) pp.258-263.
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), Hardy Society Journal, 3/2 (2007), pp.90-96.

Other activities

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. With Penelope Price and Hannah Sheppard, I am co-editor of The Brodie Press, a poetry publisher. I have been external panel member for a course review of Continuing Education programmes at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and external assessor for an online creative writing course at the University of Oxford.