Katie da Cunha Lewin
Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
About
Dr Da Cunha Lewin is module leader of BA modules Modernism (level 5) Fiction of the 21st Century (level 6).
She has supervised 3rd year dissertations on contemporary British feminist writing and on Gertrude Stein.
She is interested in supervising doctoral students working on areas relating to modernism and contemporary fiction, and particularly interested in those working on representations of writing and other forms of creative work in post-45 literature and culture.
Career overview
Katie joined Coventry in 2020 first as an HPL, and then as a Lecturer in 2021. She gained her PhD in 2018 from the University of Sussex. She has taught courses on film, literature, and theory at City Lit, the IF Project, Picturehouse Cinemas, Bishopsgate Institute, as well as University of Sussex and the University of Roehampton.
Research
Katie is interested in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. Her PhD looked at the representation of interior space in the work of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee. She co-edited (along with Kiron Ward) a collection of essays entitled Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, which brought together established and emerging scholars to examine the work of DeLillo in new ways, including through environmental studies, critical whiteness studies, and theoretical physics.
She has written on DeLillo for the Dictionary of Literary Biography as well as in her own volume, where she wrote about metaphors of apocalypse in DeLillo’s early novels. She has also written on DeLillo, his depictions of land art and his relationship to Robert Smithson, in the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts, edited by Dr. Catherine Gander.
She is currently working on her first nonfiction book which considers the continuing cultural fascination with space of the writer’s room. This will be published in 2024.
She is also developing a new writing project on representations of writing labour in the Millennial novel.
External activities
Katie is also a writer and reviewer, and her work has been published at the Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The White Review, among many other places. She was also an editor at the website Review31.
Publications and press
Books
- Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward eds., Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Book chapters
- 'The Work of Writing/Writing of Work in the Millennial Novel' in The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel ed. by Chris Lloyd and Loic Bourdeau (forthcoming, 2023)
- 'Land Art: Don DeLillo and Robert Smithson' in The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts ed. by Catherine Gander (forthcoming, 2022)
- ‘A Trick of the Light: Don DeLillo in the 21st Century’ [with Kiron Ward] in Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward eds., Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
- Apocalyptism, Environmentalism and the Other in Don DeLillo's End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner's Star in Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward eds., Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
- ‘Don DeLillo,’ Twenty-First-Century American Novelists, 3rd. Series, Vol. 382, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 2018), pp. 41-61.
Selected essays
- ‘A labour we will never see’, Los Angeles Review of Books, October 27th, 2021
- ‘The bed’, The Tangerine: Issue Ten, May 2021, Print magazine.
- Let’s try again. Start Over: On Nathalie Leger, The White Review, September 2020
- The Politics of Rediscovery, LARB, 17th August 2020
Nonfiction
- The Writer’s Room (forthcoming, 2024)
