Dr Will Norman

BA (Nottingham), DPhil (Oxon) 

Will Norman is a scholar of 20th-century American literature and culture. He has taught at Kent since 2008. He has been a Leverhulme Research Fellow, a Fulbright scholar at Yale University and a visiting research fellow at the University of Sydney. He is co editor-in-chief at the Journal of American Studies. He is the author of Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), and Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (Routledge, 2012). His latest book, on complicity, race and liberalism will be published in 2025 by Oxford University Press.

Will Norman’s research interests cover the literature and culture of the mid-20th-century and post-World War Two era. They include the novel and short story, the history of ideas, the visual arts, labour, modernism, mapping, and crime fiction. His current research examines the relationship between cultural work, psychological warfare, and the national security apparatus during and after World War Two.

Will recently completed a book on the idea of complicity in post-war literary and intellectual history, with the support of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. It shows how works of literature, from highbrow fiction to essays and crime stories, responded to the aesthetic challenge of representing states of complicity, and traces how they participated in shifting debates about race and the nature of individual responsibility in the era of post-war liberalism. As a part of this project, in 2019 he co-edited a special issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies on complicity after 1945.  

His previous book, Transatlantic Aliens, asked what happened to modernism in the United States after World War Two, using a transatlantic frame to analyse the work and careers of European writers, artists and intellectuals who migrated to America in the midcentury period. His first monograph, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time, examined the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, analysing the author’s engagement with ideas of time in the context of the historical upheavals he lived through, such as the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and Cold War.

Will has also published widely on the history of American crime fiction, reflected most recently in chapters for the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023) and Los Angeles: A Literary History (2025).

Will has supervised PhD students to successful completion on a variety of topics, including graphic novels in the 1980s and 90s; the representation of addiction in American drama; mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles as a cultural frontier; gender and medicalization in Cold War fiction; Vladimir Nabokov and George Bataille. Please contact him if you would like to discuss a potential PhD project relating to any of my research interests.