Dr Ian McGuire
Ian McGuire has been at The University of Manchester since 1996, initially as a lecturer in American Literature and more recently as a lecturer in Creative Writing. He now co-directs the Centre for New Writing.
Having completed his MA at the University of Sussex he received his PhD from the University of Virginia, where he specialised in nineteenth-century American Literature. He has written and published on Whitman, Melville and Howells, and is particularly interested in the American realist tradition from the 1880s to the present day.
His first novel - the contemporary campus novel Incredible Bodies - was published by Bloomsbury in March 2006, and was described as "hugely entertaining" and "a 21st century Lucky Jim" by The Times. The Sunday Times found it "very funny and disconcertingly sad", while John Mullan in The New Statesman noted that Incredible Bodies - a "refreshingly low-minded campus novel" - was evidence that the genre had plenty of misanthropic life in it.
More information about both author and novel is available on the Bloomsbury website. Dr McGuire has also published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and elsewhere, and is currently working on a new novel which is "definitely not set in a university".
He is happy to supervise PhD students in creative writing and/or American literature.