# Steven Connor

Steven Kevin Connor, FBA (born 11 February 1955) is a British literary scholar. Since 2012, he has been the Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was formerly the academic director of the London Consortium and professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck, University of London.

## Early life and education

Connor was born on 11 February 1955 in Chichester, in Sussex, England. From 1966 to 1972, he was educated at Christ's Hospital, Following his expulsion, he attended Bognor Regis School, a comprehensive school in Bognor Regis. In 1973, he matriculated into Wadham College, Oxford to study English; his tutor was Terry Eagleton. He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1976. He remained at Oxford to study for a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in English. He completed his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis titled "Prose fantasy and myth-criticism 1880–1900". Though he never published his thesis in book form, all of the work that has followed it may be seen as concerned with the mechanics of fantasy.

## Academic career

In 1979 or 1980, Connor joined Birkbeck College, University of London, as a lecturer in English. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1990, made Reader in Modern English Literature in 1991, and appointed Professor of Modern Literature and Theory in 1994. He held two senior positions at the college: he was Pro-Vice-Master for International and Research Students between 1998 and 2001; and College Orator between 2001 and 2012. From 2002 to 2012, he additionally served as Academic Director of the London Consortium, a graduate school of the University of London that specialised multidisciplinary programs.
In October 2012, Connor was appointed as Grace 2 Professor of English in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He was also elected a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
In 2023 he became Director of Research in the Digital Futures Institute, King's College, London.

## Personal life

In 1984, Connor married Lindsey Richardson. Together they had one daughter. They divorced in 1988. In 2005, Connor married Lynda Nead. Together they have two sons. Nead is an art historian and academic.

## Honours

In 2012, Connor was elected an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London. In July 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

## Selected works
### Books

* Charles Dickens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
* Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
* Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (1989) 2nd, revised and enlarged edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
* Theory and Cultural Value (1992)
* The English Novel in History 1950–1995 (1995)
* James Joyce (Exeter: Northcote House, 1996)
* Dumbstruck – A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000)
* The Book of Skin (2003)
* Fly (London: Reaktion, 2006)
* The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010)
* Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011)
* A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011)
* Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014)
* Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
* Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion, 2016)
* Dream Machines (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017)
* The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (London: Reaktion, 2019)
* Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
* A History of Asking (London: Open Humanities Press, 2023)
* Dreamwork: Why All Work Is Imaginary (London: Reaktion, 2023)
* Styles of Seriousness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023)

### Edited Books

* Samuel Beckett’s `Waiting for Godot’ and `Endgame': A New Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
* Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1994)
* Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1996)
* Charles Dickens (London: Longman ‘Critical Readers’, 1996).
* (with Daniela Caselli and Laura Salisbury) Other Becketts (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002)
* The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
* Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Faber, 2010)

### Recent Articles 2014-present

* ‘Spelling Things Out’, New Literary History, 45 (2014): 183-97.
* ‘Guys and Dolls‘, Women: A Cultural Review, 26 (2015): 129-41.
* ‘Blissed Out: On Hedonophobia’. in On Happiness: New Ideas For the Twenty-First Century, ed. Camilla Nelson, Deborah Pike and Georgina Ledvinka (Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2015), pp. 65-80
* ‘The Art of Foam and Froth’ and ‘The Matter of Air’, in Choreographie des Klangs – Zwischen Abstraktion und Erzählung/Choreography of Sound: Between Abstraction and Narration, ed. Ekkehard Skoruppa, Marie-Louise Goerke, Gaby Hartel and Hans Sarkowicz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), pp. 275-81, 313-6.
* ‘Literature, Technology and the Senses’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 177-96.
* ‘Choralities’, Twentieth-Century Music, 13 (2016): 3-23.
* ‘Decomposing the Humanities’, New Literary History 47 (2016): 275-88. Reprinted in Latour and the Humanities, ed Rita Felski and Stephen Muecke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), pp. 158-74.
* ‘The Return of Finitude’, Textual Practice, 30 (2016): 1165-6.
* ‘Vocus Pocus’, in This Is A Voice: 64 Exercises to Train, Project and Harness the Power of Your Voice, ed. Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Kayes (London: Profile, 2016).
* ‘Numbers It Is: The Musemathematics of Modernism’, in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 98-109.
* ‘The Game of Work: Ai Weiwei and Wittgenstein’, in Ai Wewei: Cubes and Trees (Cambridge: Heong Gallery, Downing College, 2016), pp. 23-7.
* ‘How To Do Things With Writing Machines’, Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, ed. Sean Pryor and David Trotter (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), pp. 18-34.
* ‘Modernism After Postmodernism’, The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 820-34.
* ‘Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema’, in Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, ed. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 211-27.
* ‘Acousmanie’ [in French], trans. Marie Verry, in Max Feed: Oeuvre et héritage, ed. Daniele Balit, special issue hors-série, Revue d’ailleurs (Besançon) (2018), 67-72.
* ‘Unwired’, Dirty Furniture. 4 (2018): 136-43.
* ‘Telling the Future’, Cabinet, 65 (2018): 69-71.
* ‘Parables of the Para-’, in Parasites: Exploitation and Interference in French Thought and Culture, ed. Matt Phillips and Tomas Weber (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 13-29.
* ‘The Matter of Beckett’s Facts’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 28 (2019): 5-18.
* ‘Professing’, Critical Quarterly, 61 (2019): 41-8.
* ‘Imaginary Energies: The Arts of Perpetuity’, in Energies in the Arts, ed. Douglas Kahn (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2019), pp. 57-85.
* ‘In Public’, in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 51-61.
* ‘Admiring the Nothing of It: Shakespeare and the Senseless’, in Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, ed. Simon Smith (London: Bloomsbury 2020), pp. 40-61.
* ‘Datelines’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mathematics and Literature, ed. Alice Jenkins, Robert Tubbs and Nina Engelhardt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 513-28.
* ‘Scaphander’, in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley (London: Reaktion, 2021), pp. 277-9.
* ‘Terry Eagleton’s Divine Comedy‘, Theory Now, 5 (2022): 82-98.
* ‘Consorting‘, Critical Quarterly, 64 (2022), 14-19.
* ‘Asphyxiations’, SubStance, 52 (2023), 74-8.