William Adamson

Dr William Adamson is Lecturer (Teaching Fellow) at the Chair of English and American Cultural Studies, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, where he has taught since 2021 after three decades as Academic Coordinator of English at Ulm University.

Education:

• BA (Hons) English & German Studies, Middlesex University London (1975-77)
• MA English & German Studies, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (1978-81)
• Dr. phil., Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (1982-89)

Research interests cluster around four domains: the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, crime fiction—especially Raymond Chandler—20th-century poetry (MacNeice, Marvell, Smollett), and psychoanalytically informed film studies (Lynch, Gilliam). He has edited four Raymond Chandler Yearbooks and published monographs on Tobias Smollett and on the friendship between Hopkins and Robert Bridges.

His articles map a trajectory from close readings of canonical poems through genre studies of hard-boiled detective fiction to psychoanalytic explorations of voyeurism and virtual worlds in contemporary cinema, always combining textual precision with cultural context.

Selected publications: Cadences of Unreason (1990), Which Words? (1993), Raymond Chandler Yearbook vols. 1-4 (1996-2001), Mine Own Familiar Friend (2021), plus numerous articles and reviews.

Consultation at Bamberg is by appointment; he can be reached at william.adamson@uni-bamberg.de.