Dr Wim Van Mierlo

Wim holds a PhD in English from the University of Miami and has worked in Higher Education for over 25 years in the USA, Belgium, and the UK.  He joined Loughborough in 2015 and is now Senior Lecturer in English, teaching across the English and liberal Arts programmes. He is also currently the Programme Lead for English.  

Wim is known as a Modernist and a textual scholar, with an interest in literary archives and heritage, the history of the book and publishing, and the digital humanities. He has published extensively on the work of James Joyce, as well as on T. Sturge Moore and W. B. Yeats, and on a wide range of topics pertaining to modern literary manuscripts and scholarly editing.

In 2014-15, he was the lead investigator for the AHRC Collaborative Skills Development Programme, ‘WISE: What is Scholarly Editing?’ in partnership with Durham and Cardiff Universities.

He is the outgoing president of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (2016-2024) and former editor of the Society's journal, Variants.

He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the James Joyce Quarterly, advisory editor for the Oxford University Press's The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis, a member of the Editing Modernist Letters Network (Open University/Birmingham), an associate member of the Centre for Creativity Research (Jagiellonian University, Poland), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

In his spare time, Wim is a keen photographer, working in documentary photography, landscape, and the ‘new topographics’.

Wim’s research extends across different disciplines, periods, and authors. His primary period, though, is Modernism and the early twentieth century. His main expertise is the analysis of modern drafts and manuscripts (not least their physical or palaeographical characteristics) and the theories and practice of scholarly editing. His latest book, Scholarly Editing in Perspective, will appear from Cambridge University Press in early 2025.

Although Wim has written on a range of authors (including William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, T. Sturge Moore, Fred D’Aguiar and Thomas Pynchon) he has been working on James Joyce – and on Finnegans Wake in particular – since the beginning of his academic career.  This has resulted in countless essays and articles, two edited volumes, and a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly. His recent monograph, James Joyce and Cultural Genetics: The Joycean Genome (Bloomsbury, 2023), is the culmination of long engagement with Joyce’s life, work, and archive. Centring upon the ‘double helix’ of genetic criticism and cultural studies, this book for the first time directly connects Joyce’s creative process, as it emerges from his drafts, with his engagement with Irish nationalism and the work of the Irish Cultural Revival.

In terms of approach, James Joyce and Cultural Genetics exemplifies the main tenets of Wim’s work: an inquiry into the historical and socio-economic dimensions of literature and its modes of production and reception. His interest in and exploration of the methods and critical frameworks of literary archives, literary heritage, scholarly editing, book and publishing history, and the digital humanities are key to these investigations. Under Wim’s leadership, these frameworks also inform the core strategies and activities of the Loughborough Editing and Textual Scholarship (LETS) research group.

As a scholarly editor, Wim has produced a major edition for the prestigious Cornell Yeats series of the manuscripts of Where There is Nothing and The Unicorn from the Stars, two genetically related plays co-written by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. He is also slated to edit May Sinclair’s  The Combined Maze for Edinburgh University Press and Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God for Oxford University Press.

Wim’s current major project is called The Archaeology of the Poem, a comparative investigation of the creative practices of six major poets: William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, and Ted Hughes.

He also has a number of other interests that he is actively exploring: literary heritage, literary exhibitions, and literary house museums; space/place in D. H. Lawrence; doing digital ‘things’ with literary texts (micro-analysis with R, comparative judgement), and the history of Ladybird Books.

Wim teaches across the English and the Liberal Arts undergraduate programmes on subjects that bring a socio-historical and digital angle to the study of literature and culture. His ‘core’ period is Modernism, but his teaching ranges across literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, covering topics such as literary archives, the history of printing and the book, the political poem, digital approaches, and essay writing skills. He also teaches a specialist third-year module on digital scholarly editing and contributes to the Contemporary Literature and Cultural MA on publishing and the literary market place. 

• Andie Goldstraw, Becoming Louis MacNeice
• Eleanor Dumbill, Vanished Authors and Invisible Trollopes: The Role of Publishers, Networks, and Cultural Capital in Shaping the Lasting Reputation of Three Victorian Women Writers
• Leah Henrickson, Towards a New Sociology of the Text: The Hermeneutics of Algorithmic Authorship
• Volker Jansen, The Perception of British Literature and the Publication Practice in the Former German Democratic Republic Between 1951 and 1989

• Scholarly Editing in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024).
• James Joyce and Cultural Genetics: The Joycean Genome (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
• ‘Poetry: The Form and Culture of Poetic Creation in English Poetry Manuscripts, 1600–2000’, in O. Beloborodova and D. Van Hulle (eds.), A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2024),  pp. 269–287. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxv.19mie.
• ‘The Scholarly Edition as Digital Experience: Reading, Editing, Curating’, Textual Cultures 15(1), 2022, 117–25.
• ‘Vision and Revision in the Manuscripts of William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats’, in J. Bloom and C. Rovera (Eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 17–36.
• ‘What to do with literary manuscripts? A Model for Manuscript Studies after 1700’, Comma: International Journal on Archives, 2018, 75–87, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3828/comma.2017.6.
• Anniversary Joyce, a special issue of James Joyce Quarterly, 56 (1-2), 2018 (co-edited with Vike Plock and James Kelly).
• ‘James Joyce and the Middlebrow’, in R. Crowley and D. Van Hulle (Eds.), New Quotatoes: Joycean Exogenesis in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016), pp. 141–162.