Home / Staff / Dr Angus McFadzean

Dr Angus McFadzean

Acting Course Director of the MSt in Creative Writing

Programme Director of OUSSA (Oxford University Summer School for Adults)

Departmental Lecturer in Literature and Film

angus.mcfadzean@conted.ox.ac.uk

Dr Angus McFadzean is departmental lecturer specialising in British and American Literature and Film.

After completing a doctorate at Wadham College, Oxford, he worked with the Continuing Education Department’s international programmes and summer schools, teaching widely on literature of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century, specifically modernism and the works of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and WB Yeats.

Currently, he is Acting Course Director of the postgraduate Masters in Creative Writing, and teaches on the UG Certificate in English Literature and the UG Diploma in Creative Writing.

He is also Program Director of the Oxford University Summer School for Adults, leading a six week programme involving over four hundred students and sixty tutors.

He has also tutored at various Oxford colleges, including Pembroke, University College, Mansfield and St Catherine’s.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

He utilises a range of different teaching strategies and methodologies, including prior reading requirements, mini-lectures, images, text and clips in Powerpoint, handouts, discussion, Q&As, paired and group work, and presentations.

He aims to create a collaborative learning environment in which students can become empowered to direct their own learning, through engagement with the material, the teacher and their peers.

He has designed and delivered lectures for large audiences, seminars for small-group learning, online distance learning (VLE and hybrid), and one-on-one tutorials.

He supports participants by integrating individual learners into an emerging group dynamic through discussion, encouragement, patience, and diplomacy. His teaching builds student confidence and comprehension.

His research interests lie in the long twentieth century and involve the intersection of aesthetics, narrative, genre and history in cultural production.

His doctorate focused on James Joyce’s concept of epiphany. He co-edited Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition (2024) and his thesis is being revised for publication as James Joyce and the Aesthetics of Transgression.

He’s also interested in the representations of suburbia in cinema. He published Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century (2019) and is currently editing a collection of essays with a colleague titled The Amblin Legacy: Coming of Age since the 1980s (due 2027).

His third research area is the influence of petroleum in twentieth-century cultural production. He is currently researching a cultural history titled ‘Petrofictions: Culture in the Age of Oil.’

MacDuff, McFadzean and Beja (2024) Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition. University of Florida Press.
McFadzean (2023) ‘The Aesthetic of Transgression: Love and Limits in the Early Work of James Joyce’. The James Joyce Quarterly. 60.1. Spring/Summer 2023.
McFadzean (2021) ‘Historicizing Dystopia: Suburban Fantastic Media and White Millennial Childhood’, Los Angeles Review of Books. 30th August 2021.
McFadzean (2019) Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press.