Professor Philip Tew
Honorary Professor - Arts and Humanities

Research supervision

Current Doctoral Supervision:

Since retirement Tew currently only supervises a few remaining doctoral students on an occasional basis. In a private capacity he advises potential doctoral candidates in the following areas: Post-War and Contemporary British Aleatory Fiction; Post-war American Fiction; and Contemporary Anglophone British Fiction.

Previous Research Supervision:

Prof Tew's expertise is in the areas of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and culture, Anglo-American literary and cultural contexts, and twentieth / twenty-first century criticism and theory. His own areas of research interests also include: aesthetic and philosophical interpretation and analysis of culture and fiction; meta-realist (critical and radical realist) interpretations; sociology and fiction; the Anglo-American experimental novel; and fiction and social gerontology. He also publishes occasionally in other fields, including American Fiction and Victorian Studies.

To date Prof. Tew has undertaken close supervision of students who have successfully submitted PhDs in various fields, including: Salman Rushdie; Marginality in Contemporary British Fiction (published by Continuum); the Anti-Heroic in the American Novel of the 1960s (published by Palgrave MacMillan in New York); Representations of Arabia and North Africa in Selected Prose and Novels from 1945; Selected Fiction of Salman Rushdie; London in Contemporary Fiction; Modernism, Selected Women Modernist Writers and correlations with Henri Bergson and William James; the Fiction of Alan Burns; Postmodernism, Realism and John Fowles;  and Iraq War Fiction; For the last two of these his students were awarded a Brunel University London Vice-Chancellor’s Prize in 2009 and 2016 for the completion of an outstanding doctoral research. Tew has also offered both formal and informal tuition to other successful PhD students on a variety of topics including: Laurence Sterne; Margaret Oliphant; and theory for a project on Beckett and the theatre of cruelty. Tew's current postgraduate students are undertaking research which includes the following areas: Selected Women Modernist Writers and correlations with Henri Bergson and William James; Fictional Representations of the Iraq War; The Life and Fiction of Alan Burns; Post-War British Aleatory Fiction; Literary and Cultural Representations of Margaret Thatcher; Darwin and Darwinism in Contemporary British Fiction; and Contemporary Anglo-South Asian Anglophone Fiction.