Bharat Tandon

I was born in East London and grew up in Essex. I did my undergraduate and graduate study in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then taught at Cambridge from 1995 to 2006, and at Oxford from 2006 to 2011, before joining UEA in 2012.

My research and teaching interests take in British literature from 1700 to the present day, and American literature from 1900. My doctoral research was on Jane Austen, and I have gone on to work in detail on other nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, as well as on British Modernist writers such as Henry Green.

In addition to my academic research and teaching, I have been active since 1994 as a commentator on contemporary British and American fiction and culture, writing regularly for publications such as The Times Literary Supplement and The Daily Telegraph. My activities in this area led to my serving as one of the judges for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

I am particularly interested in Romantic period fiction, ghosts and the Victorian imagination, fictional representations of urban space, contemporary British fiction, and the various ways in which literary style can embody and dramatise the complexities of writers' relations to their historical and cultural contexts.