Adam Piette

Professor Adam Piette is a distinguished academic specializing in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield's School of English. He holds the position of Professor of Modern Literature and contributes significantly to the institution through teaching, research, and editorial work. Piette serves as general editor of the student creative writing magazine Route 57 and co-edits the poetry journal Blackbox Manifold, demonstrating his commitment to fostering literary talent.

His academic journey began with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he completed a PhD on prose rhymes and memory representation in French and Irish modernist texts. Before joining Sheffield, he taught at the Universities of Paris XIII, Geneva, and Lausanne for a decade, followed by positions as lecturer and Reader at the University of Glasgow from 1997 to 2005.

Piette's research spans Cold War literature, Beckett studies, espionage fiction, and contemporary poetry, with particular focus on the intersection of war, memory, and literary form. His work explores how literature engages with historical trauma, political conflict, and cultural memory across the 20th century. He currently leads the Cultures of the Cold War network and is researching Beckett's relationship to the French Cold War and maternal themes.

His extensive publication record reveals consistent engagement with war literature, modernist studies, and Cold War cultural production. The most recent works demonstrate an evolving focus toward nuclear criticism, European identity formation during the Cold War, and the representation of war dead in poetry. His scholarship shows remarkable continuity in exploring how literature processes historical trauma while increasingly incorporating digital humanities approaches, as evidenced by his current GenAI project to make historical texts accessible.

• Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for his book on Cold War writing

Piette actively supervises research students in modernism, war studies (particularly Cold War literature), and is open to projects on Joyce, Beckett, Proust, French-English comparative work, and 20th century/contemporary poetry. He teaches core modules in Modern and Contemporary Literature, specialized courses on Cold War Fiction and Film, and Irish Fiction, while also helping convene the Creative Writing MA programme. His current research includes a GenAI project to make the 200-year-old Bibliothèque britannique accessible to new audiences.