Steven Connor


Steven Kevin Connor, FBA is a British scholar of literature, language and culture. He was formerly the Academic Director of the London Consortium, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is currently Director of Research in the Digital Futures Institute, King's College, London.

Early life and education

Connor was born on 11 February 1955 in Chichester, in Sussex, England. From 1966 to 1973, he was educated at Christ's Hospital and Bognor Regis School. In 1973, he matriculated into Wadham College, Oxford to study English; his tutor was Terry Eagleton. He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976. He remained at Oxford to study for a Doctor of Philosophy degree in English. He completed his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis titled "Prose fantasy and myth-criticism 1880–1900". Though never published in book form, his thesis anticipates all of his succeeding work as a phantasmatician, taken up with the operations of fantasy, defined as things we want to be true, even if they are.

Academic career

In 1979 or 1980, Connor joined Birkbeck College, University of London, as a lecturer in English. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1990, made Reader in Modern English Literature in 1991, and appointed Professor of Modern Literature and Theory in 1994. He held two senior positions at the college: he was Pro-Vice-Master for International and Research Students between 1998 and 2001; and College Orator between 2001 and 2012. From 2002 to 2012, he additionally served as Academic Director of the London Consortium, a graduate school of the University of London that specialised in multidisciplinary programs.
In October 2012, Connor was appointed as Grace 2 Professor of English in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He was also elected a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
In 2023 he became Director of Research in the Digital Futures Institute, King's College, London.

Personal life

In 1984, Connor married Lindsey Richardson. Together they had one daughter. They divorced in 1988. In 2005, Connor married Lynda Nead. Together they have two sons. Nead is an art historian and academic.

Honours

In 2012, Connor was elected an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London. In July 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Selected works

Books

Charles Dickens Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary 2nd, revised and enlarged edn Theory and Cultural Value The English Novel in History 1950–1995 James Joyce Dumbstruck – A Cultural History of Ventriloquism The Book of Skin Fly The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things A Philosophy of Sport Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity Dream Machines The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions A History of Asking Dreamwork: Why All Work Is Imaginary Styles of Seriousness
  • ''Gaston Bachelard: An Intellectual Biography''

Edited Books

Samuel Beckett’s `Waiting for Godot’ and `Endgame': A New Casebook

Essays 2020-present

  • ‘In Public’, in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, pp. 51-61.
  • ‘Admiring the Nothing of It: Shakespeare and the Senseless’, in Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, ed. Simon Smith, pp. 40-61.
  • ‘Datelines’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mathematics and Literature, ed. Alice Jenkins, Robert Tubbs and Nina Engelhardt, pp. 513-28.
  • ‘Scaphander’, in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley, pp. 277-9.
  • ‘Terry Eagleton’s Divine Comedy‘, Theory Now, 5, 82-98.
  • ‘Consorting‘, Critical Quarterly, 64, 14-19.
  • ‘Asphyxiations’, SubStance, 52, 74-8.
  • 'Afterword', in Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, pp. 309-14.
  • 'Michel Serres and Glory', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 29, 127-36.