Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Level 4:

• Critical Theory in Action 
• Criticism, Culture and Literature 1
• Criticism, Culture and Literature 2 
• World Literature 
• Fine Art Theory 1 - Modernism and Avant Gardes 
• Aspects of European Modernism
• Narrative and Narratology 
• Skills and Strategies 
• Art of Poetry

 Level 5:

• Robots, Cyborgs and Digital Worlds 
• Cultures of Publishing
• Crime, Culture and Transgression 
• American Vistas: Literature and Culture of the USA
• Avant Gardes and Experiments in Twentieth Century Writing 
• Twentieth Century Writing 
• American Literature                   

Level 6:

• Contemporary Literature 
• Critical Essay/Dissertation Supervision 
• Professional Writing for Artists

Supervision

Masters Modules:

• MA in Publishing - pathway in Fashion Journalism

My research is focused on American Literature and Culture, Twentieth and Twenty-First Century literature and Cultural and Media Studies. I am particularly interested in the postwar period, and architectural and geographical studies relating to space and place. My current work includes a monograph that examines American literature from a spatial humanities perspective, reading characterisation, bodies and identities as marked and influenced by historical and fictional urban and suburban settings. I am also co-editor of a surveillance cultural studies series with Palgrave Macmillan and a collection of essays on the popular HBO television series Westworld. My future research includes a project that extends my work in spatial humanities into the latter half of the Twentieth Century, examining the role of American landscapes and pastoral/rural settings in the formation of queer, gendered and racial identity, and an edited collection tentatively entitled Re-reading Aliens.

Research grants and awards

HSS Promoting Pedagogies Grant (2019) 

Books

• Goody A, Mackay A, Ed., Reading Westworld, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030145149 eISBN: 9783030145156
  Abstract

  Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV seriesWestworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. 
  

  Website 
• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030003708 eISBN: 9783030003715
  Abstract

  This edited collection examines the culture of surveillance as it is expressed in the built environment. Expanding on discussions from previous collections; Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017) and Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018), this book seeks to explore instances of surveillance within and around specific architectural entities, both historical and fictitious, buildings with specific social purposes and those existing in fiction, film, photography, performance and art. Providing new readings of, and expanding on Foucault’s work on the panopticon, these essays examine the role of surveillance via disparate fields of enquiry, such as the humanities, social sciences, technological studies, design and environmental disciplines. Surveillance, Architecture and Control seeks to engender new debates about the nature of the surveilled environment through detailed analyses of architectural structures and spaces; examining how cultural, geographical and built space buttress and produce power relations. The various essays address the ongoing fascination with contemporary notions of surveillance and control.--Supplied by publisher.

  Website 
• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Surveillance, Race, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
  ISBN: 9783319779379 eISBN: 9783319779386
  Abstract

  This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging. 
  

  Website 
• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves, Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
  ISBN: 9783319490847
  Abstract

  In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, watching and being watched are the salient features of the lives depicted in many of our cultural productions. This collection examines surveillance as it is portrayed in art, literature, film and popular culture, and makes the connection between our sense of ‘self’ and what is ‘seen’. In our post-panoptical world which purports to proffer freedom of movement, technology notes our movements and habits at every turn. Surveillance seeps out from businesses and power structures to blur the lines of security and confidentiality. This unsettling loss of privacy plays out in contemporary narratives, where the ‘selves’ we create are troubled by surveillance. This collection will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, contemporary literature, film and art and American studies.   
  

  Website 

Book chapters

• Mackay A, 'Architecture and American Horror Story: Reading "Murder House" on murderous bodies' in Susan Flynn, Antonia Mackay (ed.), Surveillance, architecture and control : Discourses on spatial culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030003708 eISBN: 9783030003715
  Abstract Using theories of feminist corporeality, and drawing on the works of Beatriz Colomina (Sexuality and Space), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies) and Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus), this chapter seeks to read American Horror Story’s first season, “Murder House”, through the architecture of the home. In doing so, this chapter intends to read the effect of the haunted house on the bodies who reside within its frames, and therefore the formation of identity. This chapter argues that a reading of the architectural environment in “Murder House” provides the impetus for both seemingly gender normative and also non-normative behaviour (murderous, demonic and disfigured), suggesting it is the architectural space of the renovated Victorian mansion which can maim, morph and manipulate bodies into conforming to familial normality, or else transgress into heterogeneous (and potentially non-human) identities.Website 
• Mackay A, 'Cops and incarceration: Constructing racial narratives in reality TV’s prisons' in Flynn S, Mackay A (ed.), Surveillance, Race, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
  ISBN: 9783319779379 eISBN: 9783319779386
  Abstract

  In line with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum, this chapter investigates the hyperconsumerism and commercialisation of bodies in reality television programs, specifically those set in American prisons. Using popular shows such as Cops and Lockup, the analysis contained here examines the manner in which African American male bodies are both framed and objectified by the surveillance of television cameras. With reference to both Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1986), the analysis unearths the role of the surveillant gaze in determining racial narratives and framing bodily identity.
  

  Website 

 Edited Collections

Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (Palgrave Macmillan: 2017)

Surveillance, Race, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018)

Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018)

Reading Westworld (Palgrave Macmillan: forthcoming 2019)

Surveilling America On Screen: Discourses on the Nostalgic Lens (McFarland: forthcoming 2020)

Special Issues: Journals

Special Issue of C21, "Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature" (Open Library of the Humanities, 2019)

Special Issue of Northern Lights, "Horrific Bodies: Surveillance, Screens and Screams" (Intellect, 2019)

Referreed Journal Articles

“Hard Men: Manufactured Bodies and Hypermasculinity”, The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol.4 Issue 1&2 (March-June 2017)

 Chapters

“Hubert Selby Jr” in American Writers XXIX, Cengage, June 2018

“Cops and Incarceration: Constructing Racial Narratives in Reality TV’s Prisons.” Surveillance, Race, Culture, (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018)

“Architecture and American Horror Story: Reading 'Murder House' on Murderous Bodies.” Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: December 2018)

“Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom” in Reading Westworld (Palgrave Macmillan: 2019)

“Stranger Things in Strange Times: Surveillance, Nostalgia and Contemporary American Politics” in Surveilling America On Screen: Discourses on the Nostalgic Lens (McFarland: forthcoming 2020)

 Other Publications (online and reviews)

“Simians, Cyborgs and San Francisco” in two parts, British Association of American Studies Online Journal,US Studies Online, August 2015

“The Manhattan Male in Grit Flicks” in British Association of American Studies Online Journal, US Studies Online, June 2014

“Cold War Ideology and Highsmith’s Non-Self” in British Association of American Studies Online Journal, US Studies Online, June 2014

“Simulacra and Selves in Suburbia” in Culture of the Suburbs, online, 2014

Review: “Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car” in The European Review of History, September 2016

Review: “Stars, Fans and Consumption in the 1950s” in US Studies Online, February 2016

Review: “New Literary Portraits of the American West” in US Studies Online, October 2015

Review: “A Life in Education and Architecture” in Women’s History Journal Volume 23, Issue 4, 2014

Review: “American Theatre: History, Context, Form” in American Studies Today Issue 23, 2014         

Areas of expertise

I welcome dissertations on topics within twentieth and 21st century American Literature and culture; Cold War studies; technology and identity; surveillance studies and interdisciplinary projects which engage with literature via media, film, television, spatial studies (geographical humanities, architecture and urban theory) and game theory.

Membership of professional bodies

FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy)

Gender Network Committee Member, for Oxford Brookes University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences: March 2018 – present

Conferences

Selected Conference Papers:

"Stranger Things in Strange Times: Surveillance, Nostalgia and Contemporary American Politics” at BAAS, University of Sussex, April 2019

“Cops and Incarceration: Constructing Racial Narratives in Reality TV’s Prisons” at IAAS, University College Dublin, April 2018

“The Role of Space, Place and Subjectivity in the works of Hubert Selby Jr”, at BAAS, Canterbury Christchurch University, April 2017

“Embracing the Threat from Within’: Patricia Highsmith’s Conformist Masculinity in The Talented Mr Ripley” at BAAS, Queen’s University Belfast, April 2016

“Hyperreal Spaces and the Mythical Male in the West”, IHR, Gender and the Americas Series, University of London, April 2016

“Cowboys and the Cold War” at BAAS, University of Northumbria, April 2015

“Cyborgs, Selves and Subjectivity in San Francisco”, IAAS, Trinity College Dublin, April 2015

“Designing Suburbia and Designing Selves”, IHR, University of London, 2015 Anglo American Conference, July 2015

“Simulacra and Selves in Suburbia” at BAAS, University of Birmingham, April 2014

“Simulacra and Selves in Suburbia” at Cultures of the Suburbs Conference, Exeter University, June 2014

“The Influence of Architecture in Cold War Suburbia”, at Gender in the Americas, IHR, London University, November 2013 (podcast available on iTunes)

“The Influence of Architecture in Cold War Literature”, at BAAS, Exeter University, April 2013

“The Role of Space, Place and Subjectivity in the Works of Hubert Selby Jr” Arts and Humanities Winter Symposium, Oxford Brookes University, 2011

“American South as American Other” - English Faculty Conference Series, Oxford Brookes University, May 2012

“Bodies and New York City Spaces in Twentieth Century American Literature”, at the Arts and Humanities Spring Symposium, Oxford Brookes University, 2011

“Cold War Ideology and Highsmith’s Authentic Non-Self” at the Arts and Humanities Winter Symposium Oxford Brookes University, 2010

“The Influence of Suburban Architecture in Revolutionary Road”, at the BAAS Postgraduate Conference University of Northumbria, 2010

Other experience

PR Director, Show Curator and Communications Editor - OFS

PR - Calvin Klein (Paris and London; LFW 2010)

PA to the Editor, GQ Magazine

Editorial Assistant, Vogue Magazine