Will NormanView profile
Senior Lecturer
Will Norman is a Reader in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kent’s School of English. He holds a BA from Nottingham and a DPhil from Oxford. His research focuses on mid-20th-century American literature and culture, particularly modernism, complicity in post-war intellectual history, and intersections between literature and Cold War geopolitics. Norman has held prestigious fellowships, including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship at Yale University. He co-edits the Journal of American Studies and has authored major works such as Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America and Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time . His upcoming book Complicity in American Literature after 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores race, liberalism, and colonialism in postwar texts. His research spans modernist authors, Cold War cultural apparatuses, and crime fiction. Recent projects examine psychological warfare and national security narratives. Norman has supervised PhD students on topics like graphic novels, gender and medicalization in Cold War fiction, and Nabokov’s engagement with historical trauma. Norman’s publications include over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, with work featured in Comparative Literature Studies , American Literature , and Journal of American Studies . He is a co-editor of special journal issues on complicity and cartographic imagination in postwar America.









