Senior Lecturer

I have been an educator – working in HE, secondary education (as a classroom assistant and teacher), and HE again – since 2005. I joined the University of Bedfordshire’s School of Education, where I teach across both our subject areas of Education and English, in January 2018.

I am Course Coordinator for both the School’s Foundation Year (Level 3 equivalent) and BA(Hons) Education degree. Please feel free to contact me directly about either course at oliver.belas@beds.ac.uk

My research interests are in philosophy, education, and English, and I am keen to hear from potential PhD candidates interested in working in these areas. I have published a number of academic and more generalist pieces (see below), my recent monograph, A Philosophical Inquiry into Subject English and Creative Writing, was published by Routledge in 2023, and was nominated for the BERA Education Research Book of the Year.

My article, “Subject English as Citizenship Education,” written with my colleague Dr Neil Hopkins, was awarded the BERJ 2020 Editors’ Choice Award

At the University of Bedfordshire, I am a member of the Institute for Research in Education (IREd) and the Research Institute for Media, Art and Performance (RIMAP), and I supervise PhDs in both.

Qualifications

Academic (Royal Holloway, University of London)

• PhD, “Race and Culture in African American Crime and Science Fiction”: Pass without corrections, 30/11/08
• MA, Postmodernism, Literature, and Contemporary Culture: Distinction, 01/11/04
• BA (hons), English Literature: 1st Class, 01/08/03

Professional

• EA Fellowship (02/12/19)
• PGCert, Secondary English (Middlesex University/London North Consortium, 20/09/11)
• Graduate Teacher Programme: Outstanding (Middlesex University/London North Consortium, 20/09/11)
• Certificate in Skills of Teaching to Inspire Learning (Masters Level): Distinction (Royal Holloway, University of London, 01/08/06)

Research Interests/Projects

• Philosophy of Education (broadly; particular interests in aesthetics, identity, language, schooled English (Literature, Language, Creative Writing)
• (Secondary) English studies
• Creative Writing (practice, philosophy, pedagogy)
• Physical culture (history, philosophy, popular culture)
• Decentred and participatory learning
• The work of Ernst of Cassirer

Publications

Forthcoming

• “Space, Discourse, & the Student as Positional Identity: Colin in Black and White and Top Boy,” Open Screens Special Issue: Students on Screen.
• “Refusing the Tragic Pose: Zora Neale Hurston and the Cultural Politics of the Harlem Renaissance,” Edinburgh Companion to Interwar Women’s Writing in English, eds Nick Turner & Nicola Darwood (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
• Getting My House in Order [Single volume, memoir of Eric Edwin, co-produced with Eric Edwin and Nicola Darwood. Planned submission to Peepal Tree Press, spring/summer 2024.]
• Getting My House in Order IV: We’ve Come a Long Way [ISSN 2976-5471; memoir of Eric Edwin, co-produced with Eric Edwin and Nicola Darwood. Autumn/winter 2023-2024; published by Rehg AM]
• “Bodybildung,” long-form essay/pamphlet on physical cultures and educational logic (planned for 2025)
• “John Dewey and English in Education and the Language Arts” [Monograph; co-authored with Neil Hopkins; Routledge series, Routledge/IFTE Key Thinkers in English and the Language Arts; planned for 2026]

Published

Academic

• “Some Thoughts and Reflections on Identity, Teaching, and Writing, and How They Might Affect One Another.” Reflections on Identity: Narratives from Educators, eds Neil Hopkins & Carol Thompson (Springer, 2024)
• A Philosophical Inquiry into Subject English and Creative Writing (Routledge, 2023) [nominated for BERA 2023 Research Book of the Year]
• “Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and the Curriculum,” Bringing the Curriculum to Life, eds Janice Wearmouth & Karen Lindley (Open University Press, 2022)
• “Assessment in Secondary Education (England),” Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies (2019, DOI: 10.5040/9781350996281.0014; online)
• “Government, Policy, and the Role of the State in Secondary Education (England),” Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies (2019, DOI: 10.5040/9781350996274.0002; online)
• “Knowledge, the Curriculum, and Democratic Education: The Curious Case of School English,” Research in Education 103.1 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0034523719839095
• (with Neil Hopkins) “Subject English as Citizenship Education,” BERJ 45.2 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3500 [Winner of the Editors’ Choice Award]
• “Education, Knowledge, and Symbolic Form,” Oxford Review of Education 44.3 (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2017.1389711
• “Creative Writing: Mapping the Subject,” forthcoming in The Use of English 69.0 (2017)
• “The Perfectionist Call of Intelligibility: Secondary English, Creative Writing, and Moral Education,” Philosophical Inquiry in Education 24.1 (2016), https://journals.sfu.ca/pie/index.php/pie/article/view/934
• “Practically Speaking: Doing English in a Knowledge Economy,” The Use of English 68.1 (2016).
• “Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy VI.i (2014), https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/514
• “Genre,” The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, vol. II, ed. Michael Ryan (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
• “Performativity,” Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, vol. II, ed. Ryan (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
• “Chester Himes’s The End of a Primitive: Exile, Exhaustion, Dissolution,” Journal of American Studies 44.2 (2010)

Blogs/Journalism/Generalist

• Getting My House in Order [memoir of Eric Edwin; ISSN 2976-5471; chapbooks, parts I-III of co-produced memoir with Eric Edwin and Nicola Darwood, 2022-23; published by Rehg AM]
• “Postcard from the Classroom: Maisie Contra Noddings, Thinking Together, and Shooting the Shit” [with Maisie Glazier (UG student), Neil Hopkins, and the Yr.2 philosophy group (AY22-23)], Rehg Blohg, 28 April 2023: https://radedhums.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/postcard-from-the-classroom-maisie-contra-noddings-thinking-together-and-shooting-the-shit/
• “Why Strike Action Still Matters,” Rehg Blohg, 23 January 2023: https://radedhums.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/why-strike-action-still-matters/
• “Community and Research in the Classroom: Cooperative Deceit and an Addendum to Grice” [with Jake E.Z. Brown (UG student) and the Discourse and Ideology group (AY22-23)], Rehg Blohg, 14 December 2022: https://radedhums.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/community-research-in-the-classroom-cooperative-deceit-an-addendum-to-grice/
• “Post-It: Cooperation Without Politeness – The Buddy Movie Principle,” Rehg Blohg, 14 December 2022: https://radedhums.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/post-it-cooperation-without-politeness-the-buddy-movie-principlepost-it/
• “Post-It: On Fiction, Lies, and Bullshit,” Rehg Blohg, 14 December 2022: https://radedhums.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/post-it-on-fiction-lies-bullshit/
• “Civil Liberties and the Need for Lordean Rage,” PESGB Blog, 10 October 2022: https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/civil-liberties-the-need-for-lordean-rage/
• “Bodybildung (Part I),” PESGB Blog, 13 July 2022: https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/bodybildung-part-i/
• “Keeping On Keeping On,” youhq, 28 June 2022: https://www.youhq.co.uk/post/keeping-on-keeping-on
• “Philosophy as Dialogue and as Gift: Philosophy in and Beyond the Classroom,” PESGB Blog, 5 March 2022: https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/philosophy-as-dialogue-as-gift-philosophy-in-and-beyond-the-classroom/
• “Lessons from DaCosta’s Candyman,” PESGB Blog, 23 October 2021: https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/lessons-from-dacostas-candyman/
• “The Government’s Creeping Authoritarianism,” PESGB Blog, 22 March 2021: https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/the-governments-creeping-authoritarianism/
• “This is not a one-year blip: If we have to have a national assessment system, it shouldn’t be this one,” BERA Blog (27 August 2020), https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/this-is-not-a-one-year-blip-if-we-have-to-have-a-national-assessment-system-it-shouldnt-be-this-one
• “Aesthetic education: Recent thoughts on old problems,” BERA Blog (17 December 2019), https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/aesthetic-education-recent-thoughts-old-problems
• “The educational implications of Lionel Shriver’s attack on diversity ‘quotas’,” BERA Blog (12 July 2018), https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/the-educational-implications-of-lionel-shrivers-attack-on-diversity-quotas
• “If the government is serious about the study of our literary canon, why abolish Creative Writing A Level?”, TES online, https://news.tes.co.uk/b/opinion/2015/04/05/39-if-the-government-is-serious-about-the-study-of-our-literary-canon-why-abolish-creative-writing-a-level-39.aspx, published 5 April 2015
• “Creative Writing Under Threat,” LKMCo, https://www.lkmco.org/article/creative-writing-under-threat-05042015?page=2, published 05 April 2015
• “Gove’s Marbles (II): English Literature and Moral Education,” Litro (15 July 2014), http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/07/goves-marbles-english-literature-and-moral-education-part-ii/
• “Gove’s Marbles (I): English Literature and Moral Education,” Litro (27 June 2014), http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/06/goves-marbles-english-literature-and-moral-education-part-i/
• “Aesthetic Theory and Literary Study,” emagazine [journal of the English and Media Centre] 60 (April 2013) pp.41-42
• Review: Democratic Socialism and Education: New Perspectives on Policy and Practice, https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/blog/book-reviews-archived/book-review-democratic-socialism-and-education/
• Review: Noon in Paris, Eight in Chicago (Douglas Cowie), The London Magazine (21 October 2016), https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/noon-paris-eight-chicago-douglas-cowie/
• Review: Educating Character Through Stories (Carr and Harrison), Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/blog/book-reviews-archived/book-review-educating-character-through-stories/
• “The Enduring Appeal of the Mystery Story” [article], Litro #123, 6 March 2013, pp.27-30

Conferences/Seminars/Presentations

• "A Response to Hopkins's Democratic Socialism and Education," PESGB London, 30 October 2019
• "Soma-Semiotics, Physical Literacy, and Education," Postgraduate Research Conference in Education and Applied Linguistics," University of Bedfordshire, 18 June 2019
• [with Lewis Stockwell] "Bodies of Work," PESGB Bedford, 21 May 2019
• "Looking for Buddy" [ficto-critical presentation], Tales of Terror, University of Warwick, 21 March 2019
• [with Dr Neil Hopkins] "Subject English as Citizenship Education," Researching for Social Justice and Educational Improvement, BERA/IREd, University of Bedfordshire, 21 June 2018
• "Experiment and Tradition in the Creative Writing Classroom," PESGB Annual Conference 2018
• “A Writing to Come? Innovation between the Classroom and the Workshop,” Edge Poetics: A Symposium on Innovative and Speculative Creative Writing Practices in Higher Education, University of Bedfordshire, 4 November 2017
• “Creative Writing, Knowledge, and Emancipatory Pedagogics,”English: Shared Futures, Newcastle, 6 July 2017 (panel: “What Kind of Knowledge is Creative Writing?”)
• “The Bow and the Lyre: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Cassirer.” Invited speaker, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, University of Bedfordshire, 9 March 2017
• “On Tacit Knowledge for Philosophy of Education,” Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference, 3 April 2016
• “Secondary English, Creative Writing, and Knowledge.” Invited speaker, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (Bedford), 20 January 2016
• “Truth, Knowledge, and Secondary English,” British Education Research Association Annual Conference (Belfast), 17 September 2015
• “Secondary English, Creative Writing, and Moral Education,” Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference, 29 March 2015
• Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Research and Writing Retreat, September 2014, July 2015
• “If This Is Protest...: The End of a Primitive and Chester Himes’s Turn to Genre Fiction,” Rethinking Genre, Royal Holloway, 27 June 2008
• “Octavia Butler’s Fledgling: Vampires, Race, and Writing in the Era of the ‘War on Terror,’” BAAS Annual Conference, University of Leicester, 21 April 2007
• Respondent, Dramas and Trauma: Writers Responding to War, video conference, British Council Conversations programme, 3 October 2007
• “Politics, Ambivalence, and Tolerance in the Work of Octavia Butler,” Cultural Fictions II, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 16 June 2006
• “Science Fiction as Metaphor, and Metonymy in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis,” Forensic Futures: Interrogating the Posthuman Subject, Birkbeck College (University of London), 18 March 2006

• Coordinator, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Research and Writing Retreat, 26-28 June 2016
• Mentor, PESGB Summer School (Roehampton, July 2015)
• Co-Organizer, with Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway) and Dr. Elizabeth English (Cardiff Met.), of Rethinking Genre: The Politics of Cultural Form, 26-27 June 2008

Contact Details

T: +44 (0)1234 793403
E: oliver.belas@beds.ac.uk

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Photo credit: David Holbrook