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Tom Sperlinger

Senior Teaching Fellow and Head of Part-time Education

Room: 1.12

Phone: 0117 954 6969

Email: tom.sperlinger@bristol.ac.uk

Office hours

I am normally in the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Research Interests

I have research interests in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, poetry and story, and adult education. I am currently working on a series of projects about the relationship between education and experience, which E.P. Thompson (and others) have seen as characterising adult education as a sphere and practice. I am interested in how Doris Lessing's work is influenced, at different times, by Marxist ideas of self-education and by Sufi teachings, and in how Virginia Woolf imagines the responsibilities of the self-educated reader. I am also hoping to write an article on the ethics of utilising personal experience as part of the work of literary interpretation.

Teaching

I have a wide range of experience of working with adult students. I designed, manage and teach on a part-time BA in English Literature and Community Engagement and a short course, Reading English Literature, which provides an access route into a part-time degree for those who may have no prior qualifications. I am responsible for the academic management of all part-time programmes within the English Department (including admissions, assessment, student progress, and the design of courses). I have taught on a wide variety of shorter part-time courses, including at external venues such as the Single Parent Action Network.

On the BA English, I have been a tutor on the undergraduate units Approaches to Poetry, Critical Issues and Literature IV (1850-1950) and I have given undergraduate lectures on a variety of topics, including revisions in poetry, poetry and story, Shakespeare's sonnets and various novels and novelists (including Gulliver's Travels, Austen, Eliot, Woolf, Bellow and Roth). I teach a seminar on Doris Lessing, for the Women and Writing Option on the MA in English Literature.

Before coming to Bristol, I  taught on a ReachOut Access programme at Liverpool Hope University and for the Continuing Education Department at Liverpool University and worked as reader-in-residence at Tate Liverpool (all in 2002-3).

Publications

Chapter in e-book:

• 'What kind of society values adult education?', in Ken Spours and Neal Lawson (editors), Education for the Good Society. London: Compass, 2011, pp.40-43; available online.

Articles:

• (with Josie Billington) 'Where does literary study happen?', Teaching in Higher Education, special issue 'Leaving the academy', 16/5, 2011, pp.505-516.
• 'Literature and community engagement', AdLib: The Journal of Continuing Liberal Adult Education, 38, 2009, pp.23-26.
• 'Jane Austen's curiosity', Jane Austen Society Report for 2007, 2008, pp. 67-78.
• ‘“The sensitive author”: George Eliot’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 36/3, 2007, pp.250-272.
• ‘“A time capsule”: E.H. Gombrich and The Story of Art’, The Reader, 13, 2003; reproduced on the online Gombrich Archive.

Other publications:

I have published as a journalist in a variety of contexts. I contribute regularly to The Guardian and the Huffington Post on topics related to literature and adult education. I have also written for Left Foot Forward and contributed to a blog on education for Compass. I have published a comment piece on adult education in the Times Higher and interviews with A.B. Yehoshua and Doris Lessing in The Reader. I have reviewed fiction and literary criticism for the Independent on Sunday.

Review-essays:

• 'A writer without qualities: Recent work on Doris Lessing', Contemporary Women's Writing (forthcoming).
• 'Going out to play', Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey, The History of Reading (2011), The Cambridge Quarterly, 40/2 (2011) pp.161-169.
• 'Doris Lessing's work of forgiveness', Doris Lessing, Alfred and Emily (2008), The Cambridge Quarterly, 38/1 (2009), pp. 66-72. 
• 'Quite argumentative', Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy (2007), The Cambridge Quarterly, 37/2 (2008) pp.258-263.
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), Hardy Society Journal, 3/2 (2007), pp.90-96.

Conferences and external lectures

• 'George Eliot', invited seminar paper, Al Quds University, the Palestinian Territories, April 2011.
• 'The invisible university', Engaged Universities and their Learning Cities/Regions, 9th Pascal International Observatory Conference, University of Botswana, Gaborone, December 2010.
• 'Beyond The Golden Notebook: Re-reading Doris Lessing', invited lecture, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, July 2010.
• 'Public engagement in the Arts and Humanities', Exploring the What, Why and How of Public Engagement, Beacon for Wales, Cardiff, June 2010.
• 'Community engagement in the English Department', Engage 2009, Centre for Public Engagement, University of Bristol, July 2009.
• 'Passion in Mansfield Park', invited lecture, Cult and Commerce of Jane Austen, Institute of English Studies/ Jane Austen Society UK annual conference, November 2008.
• '"Lifelong to be/ I thought it": Literature and community engagement', Beyond the Lecture Hall: Universities and community engagement, University of Cambridge, September 2008.
• '"Lives that have stories": Stanley Cavell and the surprise of Shakespeare's sonnets', Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, University of Edinburgh, May 2008.
• ‘Jane Austen’s curiosity’, invited lecture, Jane Austen Society UK conference, September 2007.
• Co-organiser (with Jo Carruthers), Reading Daniel Deronda, University of Bristol; a conference for academics, postgraduates and Lifelong Learning students. Plenary speakers: Valentine Cunningham and John Rignall, 31 August/ 1 September 2007.
• ‘“A larger rhythm”: Doris Lessing’s song and dance’, on panel ‘Eastern and Non-Literary Influences’,  The Second International Doris Lessing Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, July 2007.

Other activities

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. With Penelope Price and Hannah Sheppard, I am co-editor of The Brodie Press, a poetry publisher. I have been external panel member for a course review of Continuing Education programmes at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and external assessor for an online creative writing course at the University of Oxford. At the University of Bristol, I am a member of the advisory board for the Centre for Public Engagement and a member of the Engaged University Steering Group.