An AHRC Leadership Fellow and BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinker, Sarah Jackson is an award-winning writer and literary scholar. She lives in Nottingham and is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University, where she explores the intersections between critical and creative thought and practice.

Sarah writes poetry and short fiction. Her poetry collection Pelt (2012) won the Seamus Heaney Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award; her work has been placed in various competitions including the Commonwealth Short Story Award, the Edwin Morgan Prize, the Arvon Poetry Competition and the Michael Marks Award (for her pamphlet Milk). She has read her poetry and fiction throughout the UK and abroad, including at the British Library, the Royal Albert Hall and Cambridge and New York Universities.

Sarah specialises in contemporary literature and critical theory. Her monograph Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015) examines the intimate links between the page and the skin in order to provide a new perspective on the role of touch and tact in literature, film and theory. She has written on touch in relation to animals, dancing, dermographism, gloves, the hand, polar exploration, the prosthesis, the skin and telecommunications. She has also published articles on psychoanalysis and deconstruction in relation to the work of Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, H.D. and Anne Carson.

Developing her work on remote telecommunications and touch, Sarah’s current research project explores the relationship between telephony and literature, with a particular interest in disembodied voices and the uncanny impact of new technologies on literary communication. Funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellows Award, this project involves research at the Science Museum and at the BT Archives, which holds the public records of the world’s oldest communications company.

For further details of Sarah’s publications, please see Sarah’s profile at Nottingham Trent University.