Dr Sally West

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

School for the Creative Industries
Dr Sally West

Sally teaches literature from the Renaissance to the present day. Her particular specialisms are nineteenth-century literature (especially Romanticism) and Crime Fiction. She is the Programme Leader, BA English Language and Literature (Single Honours). 

Sally is Senior Lecturer in English  and completed her BA, MA and PhD at the University of Liverpool. She joined the University of Chester in 2006.

Sally teaches literature from the Renaissance to the present day. Her particular specialisms are nineteenth-century literature (especially Romanticism) and Crime Fiction.

Modules she currently teaches on include:

  • Romantic Literature
  • Crime, Deviance and Subversion
  • Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
  • Shakespeare

She also teaches on the Department’s MA in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Postgraduate Supervision

Sally is currently supervising projects on the literary relationship of the Shelleys; Patricia Highsmith; women writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

She welcomes enquiries about research projects on: Percy Bysshe Shelley; The work of Patricia Highsmith; Crime Fiction.

Sally has presented papers and published in the area of Romantic Literature and literary influence. More recently her research interests have shifted to Crime Fiction. She is currently working on the significance of space and place in the work of Patricia Highsmith.

Recent publications

Book chapter: ‘Cultural Representations: Hair as the Abundant Signifier’ in A Cultural History of Hair: The Age of Empire, ed. Sarah Heaton (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Book chapter: ‘Mapping War and Planning Peace: Miss Marple and the Evolving Village Space, 1930-1962’; co-authored with Sarah Martin, in Agatha Christie Goes to War, edited by J. C. Bernthal and Rebecca Mills (Routledge, 2019).

Book chapter: ‘The Motto of the Mollusc: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics of Snails’ in Animals in Detective Fiction, eds John Miller and Rebecca Hawthorn (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement (Ashgate, 2007).

‘The Limits of "Perfect Solipsism": Bloom's Map and the Origins of Shelley's Dejection', inReading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom, ed. Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears (Manchester University Press, 2010).

  • BA
  • MA
  • PhD
  • PGC Learning and Teaching (HE)
  • FHEA