Staff profile

I grew up in Australia and studied for my first degrees at the University of Sydney, before coming to the UK to do my PhD at Cambridge. After teaching for a year at Homerton College, Cambridge, I held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Queensland and then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford. I came to Durham in 2012 to take up my current post, and I also serve as the founding director of Durham's Centre for Modern Conflicts and Cultures.

 

Much of my research is interested in questions concerning state surveillance, censorship, and subsidy of literature and culture. My most recent book, British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-1960, looked at the MI5 records held on key figures such as Auden, Spender, Koestler, and Orwell, and tried to show how many of these authors were not passive victims of the secret state but also conscious movers within it. (You can read a review of it in The Guardian).

 

I have published various other articles and chapters in this area, such as on government involvement in film censorship, security monitoring of radical literary magazines, and (with David Bradshaw) the collaboration between Ezra Pound and the fascist propagandist James Strachey Barnes. More recent concerns have turned to cultural depictions of intelligence, spying, and the secret state. Publications in this area include an article exploring James Bond and Skyfall in the context of recent political debates on surveillance and intelligence, and a chapter looking at how the legacy of wartime secret work manifests in the writing of George Orwell, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark.

 

Work in the medium and longer term will include: a new book looking at the many and varied ways authors and cultural works have engaged with the British intelligence services over the past century; a study of how the leaks of Edward Snowden have influenced recent film and television narratives; a Leverhulme-funded project looking at British ‘black propaganda’ operations during the Second World War; and an investigation of the role played by literature in British cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

 

I have recently edited The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s (2019). I also teach and research in the field of modern drama, offering a MA module on post-war British drama and having edited (with Richard Fotheringham) a collection of essays on contemporary Australian theatre. Finally, I have interests in critical theory, with my book on Terry Eagleton published in 2008 (the full text of a review can be found here).

 

Authored book

• Smith, James (2013). British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Smith, James (2008). Terry Eagleton. Polity.

Chapter in book

• Smith, James & Woodward, Guy (Forthcoming). Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War. In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures. Barnhisel, Greg Bloomsbury. 149-162.
• Smith, James (2023). '“It's always been me” Spectrality, Hauntings, and Retcon in Spectre'. In Bond 25. Joy, Stuart, McSweeney, Terence & Hines, Claire Wallflower/Columbia University Press.
• Smith, James (2019). 'Introduction'. In The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. Smith, James Cambridge University Press.
• Smith, James (2019). 'On Killer Bees and GCHQ: “Hated in the Nation”'. In Through the Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age. McSweeney, Terence & Joy, Stuart Palgrave Macmillan.
• Smith, James (2018). 'Covert Legacies in Postwar British Fiction'. In British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960. Plain, Gill Cambridge University Press. 337-352.
• Smith, James (2018). 'MI5 Surveillance of British Cold War Theatre'. In Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War. Balme, Christopher B. & Szymanski-Dull, Berenika. Palgrave. 133-150.
• Smith, James (2013). 'Soviet Films and British intelligence in the 1930s: The Case of Kino Films and MI5'. In Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism. Beasley, Rebecca & Bullock, Phillip. Oxford University Press. 241-257.
• Smith, James (2010). ‘The British “Information Research Department” and Cold War Propaganda Publishing’. In Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. Barnhisel, Gregory & Turner, Catherine (eds), University of Massachusetts Press. 112-125.

Edited book

• Smith, James (2019). The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. Cambridge University Press.
• Fotheringham, Richard & Smith, James (2013). Catching Australian Theatre in the 2000s. Australian Playwrights. Rodopi.

Journal Article

• Smith, James (Published). John le Carré's The Looking Glass War: Imagining the Special Operations Executive – Secret Intelligence Service Rivalry as Post-war Counterfactual History. Intelligence and National Security 38(2): 218 - 231.
• Smith, James (Forthcoming). 'Has left wing tendencies but might be used with caution': J. B. Priestley and the British Secret State. Journal of the J. B. Priestley Society
• Smith, James (Accepted). Surveillance, Security, and Wartime Propaganda: John Lehmann at the BBC. Modernist Cultures
• Smith, James (2016). “How Safe Do You Feel?” James Bond, Skyfall and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat. College Literature 43(1): 145-172.
• Smith, J. (2015). 'The MacDonald Discussion Group: A Communist Conspiracy in Britain’s Cold War Film and Theatre Industry—Or MI5’s Honey-Pot?'. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35(3): 454-472.
• Bradshaw, David & Smith, James (2013). 'Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes (`The Italian Lord Haw-Haw’) and Italian Fascism'. Review of English Studies 64(266): 672-693.
• Smith, James (2010). 'The Radical Literary Magazine of the 1930s and British Government Surveillance: the Case of Storm Magazine'. Literature & History 19(2): 69-86.
• (2006). 'Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, and the British Government'. New Theatre Quarterly 22(04): 307-323.
• (2004). Peacock’s Mr Asterias and “Polypodes” A Possible Source. Notes and Queries 249(2): 157.
• (2004). Reconsidering the Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell. Literature and Aesthetics 14(2): 87-100.
• (2003). The Humour of Terry Eagleton. Literature and Aesthetics 13(2): 73-81.

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• (2017). Terry Eagleton.