Bríd Andrews contributes to the programmes of English and Creative Writing and Film and Media Production. Having gained post graduate qualifications in both Theatre and Film from Reading and Sheffield universities she contributes to theoretical and contextual modules across both courses. Bríd has worked extensively with The Octagon Theatre, Bolton, developing industry focused programmes and researching professional practice and creative processes in the context of a working regional theatre.

Bríd also has research interests in the uses of theatre in community engagement and the uses of drama practice in the the development of transferable skills acquisition – specifically for global learners. Her current research projects supports The Centre for Worktown Studies at the University of Bolton and involves using archive materials from the collection and working with community groups in the creation of collaborative creative projects.

Ed has published five novels and a children’s book, worked for several continuing drama series, including Holby City and had short films produced by Channel 4 and BBC 2. He has written a number of plays for Radio 4, including Fact to Fiction commissioned, written and produced in one week based on the that week’s news. His recent stage play The Political History of Smack and Crack was a finalist in the Theatre 503 playwriting competition and won the Summerhall Lustrum Award at the Edinburgh Fringe, appearing at The Soho Theatre in Autumn 2019, touring nationally in 2020 before lockdown. Ed’s most recent play The Unknown X, was selected for the 2020 Elevator Festival at Newcastle Live Theatre whose opening night was the night British Theatre closed for COVID!! But We’ll be back.

Dr Valerie O’Riordan is a writer, critic and academic. She lectures in Creative Writing and English at the University of Bolton, focussing on fiction-writing, critical, cultural and literary theory, and student employability. Her fiction has appeared in numerous national and international publications, including Tin House, LitMag, The Lonely Crowd, and The Manchester Review, and she is currently working on a novel, thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England. In 2019 she was awarded an O.Henry prize for her short story, ‘Bad Girl’.

Valerie’s areas of research include contemporary Anglophone literature, critical posthumanism, trauma studies, and intersectional feminism, and she has written on Jennifer Egan, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, and Chris Adrian. She welcomes research proposals from prospective PhD students on any/all of the above topics.

Canadian poet Evan Jones has lived in Manchester since 2005. He has a PhD in English & Creative Writing from the University of Manchester.

His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (2005), was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Poetry. His second collection, Paralogues (2012), was published by Carcanet, who will publish his third collection, Later Emperors, in 2020. He has taught full-time at the University of Bolton since 2013.

Professor Jill Marsden is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for the BA English and Creative Writing degrees. She studied as both an undergraduate and postgraduate at The University of Essex and began teaching at Bolton in 1992. On the BA English degree, she teaches ‘Introduction to Literature: Form and Genre’, ‘Classics of American Literature’, ‘Aspects of Prose Fiction’, ‘Narrative Representations of Female Desire’ and ‘Ambivalent Intimacies: Reading Contemporary British Fiction’.

She is the author of After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Palgrave 2002) and a range of other publications on Nietzsche, literary modernism, nineteenth century European thought and continental philosophy. Her research interests embrace all aspects of ‘literary thinking’, particularly the affinities between philosophy and literature. She welcomes applications from PhD students exploring topics in modernism, aesthetics, women’s writing, and nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction.