Staff profile

About me

I am Research Associate on the project 'The SOE, Covert Action, and the British Cultural Imaginary', based in the Department of English Studies and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is examining the cultural legacy of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret agency created to ‘set Europe ablaze’ during the Second World War. 

From 2018-2022 I was Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the project ‘The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda and British Culture’, also based in the Department of English Studies and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project investigated the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service created by Britain during the war with the mission of spreading propaganda to enemy and enemy-occupied territories, and one which employed a host of significant authors in its campaigns. These included the novelists Muriel Spark, David Garnett, and Graham Greene; the poet Stephen Spender; the Bloomsbury writer Quentin Bell; and the historian A.J.P. Taylor. I edit the project blog at: https://sites.durham.ac.uk/writersandpropaganda/.

I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford before completing an M. Phil. in Anglo Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and subsequently a Ph.D. exploring the effects of the Second World War on literature and culture in Northern Ireland. This was followed by an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2012-13. I have since lectured at universities in Ireland and in Mexico, and from 2017-18 I held an International Fellowship at the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania.

My research interests lie in the intersections of literature, politics and international relations, with a particular focus on culture in Ireland and Britain during the mid-twentieth century and Second World War. My first book, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2015) built on research for my doctoral thesis and argues that the war, as a unique interregnum in the history of Northern Ireland, challenged the entrenched political and social makeup of the province and had a profound effect on its cultural life.

In addition to my role at Durham I am working on a project entitled Imagining Yugoslavia in Mid-Century British and Irish Writing, which examines how and why writers in Britain and Ireland became involved in military and political debates around the fate of Yugoslavia during the Second World War and Cold War. The project addresses a series of major literary writers – Louis MacNeice, Anthony Powell, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh – as well as lesser-known texts and archival sources. An article arising from this project, examining the experiences of the Irish dramatist Denis Johnston in Yugoslavia during the Second World War was published by the Irish University Review in 2018.

Authored book

• Woodward, G. (2015). Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof%3Aoso/9780198716853.001.0001

Book review

• Woodward, G. Emergency writing: Irish literature, neutrality, and the second world war. Irish Studies Review, 27(3), https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2019.1626066
• Woodward, G. (2021). Red Britain: the Russian revolution in mid-century culture. Textual Practice, 35(12), 2155-2158. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2019.1629640
• Woodward, G. (2019). Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945
• Woodward, G. (2019). Michael Pierse (ed.), A History of Irish Working-Class Writing. Literature and History, 28(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/0306197319829579
• Woodward, G. (2019). The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State by Mills, Richard. Slavonic and East European Review, 97(3), https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.97.3.0574
• Woodward, G. (2017). Academic Press, 2016. Xii + 163 pages. Irish University Review, 47(supplement), 583-585. https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2017.0316

Chapter in book

• Woodward, G. ‘A Solar Emperor’: Robert Byron Flies East. In M. McCluskey, & L. Seaber (Eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (179-199.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1
• Smith, J., & Woodward, G. (2022). Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War. In G. Barnhisel (Ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures. Bloomsbury
• Woodward, G. (2020). The War Observed. In E. Patten (Ed.), Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980 (27-45). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108616348.003
• Woodward, G. (2017). John Hewitt. In G. Dawe (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (181-196). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108333313.017
• Woodward, G. (2014). ‘We must know more than Ireland’: John Hewitt and Eastern Europe. In A. O'Malley, & E. Patten (Eds.), Ireland, West to East: Irish Literary and Cultural Connections with Central and Eastern Europe (101-114). Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0368-1

Edited book

• Depner, D., & Woodward, G. (Eds.). (2015). Irish Culture and Wartime Europe, 1938-48. Four Courts Press
• Woodward, G. (Ed.). (2014). Across the Boundaries: Talking About Thomas Kilroy. Carysfort Press

Journal Article

• Woodward, G. (2022). ‘Conducting his own Campaigns’: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda. The Review of English Studies, 73(308), 144-164. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgab057
• Woodward, G. (2021). Graham Greene Takes Flight. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 67(4), 637-659. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2021.0035
• Woodward, G. (2018). ‘These people know what they're fighting for’: Denis Johnston and the Partisans. Irish University Review, 48(2), 331-347. https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2018.0358
• Woodward, G. (2017). Douglas Goldring: ‘An Englishman’ and 1916. Literature and History, 26(2), 195-212. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306197317724666
• Woodward, G. (2016). Post-war Irish Writing. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0072