Obituary Notice: Professor Simon James

With immense sadness we must announce that Professor Simon James died in June 2025 after a short illness. The sense of loss and shock will be profound and lasting for our community and further afield.

Simon was a brilliant literary critic, an inspirational lecturer and teacher, and an illuminating supervisor, mentor, and friend. He was a leading authority on H. G. Wells, late-Victorian literature, and the modern novel. He was hugely popular with generations of Durham students.

He was the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing and Maps of Utopia: H.G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture. For many years Simon had been the editor of The Wellsian journal, and he edited Vile Bodies for the Collected Works of Evelyn Waugh, published by Oxford University Press. 

In every way, he was utterly committed to what he did – to our discipline, his students and this department, which he served for 25 years, including as Head of English Studies, and to worlds beyond academic life, such as Durham Book Festival and Durham Student Theatre, of which he was Honorary President.

There will be opportunities to pay tribute to Simon with memorial events in time, as slowly we come to terms with this terrible loss.