Who we are
Clair Wills
Clair Wills is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Cambridge, and the current holder of the John A. Harvard Professorship (2024-2029). She is a critic and cultural historian, and the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the 2017 Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the 2008 PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (2009), The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture (2015), The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment (2023), and most recently Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets, which won the 2024 W.H. Smith Non-Fiction book of the year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.
Her current research, funded by the Harvard Professorship, focuses on narratives of institutional legitimacy, responsibility and risk. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books.
Jess Cotton
Jess Cotton is a research fellow in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and a postdoctoral associate of Jesus College. She works on a range of literature, psychoanalysis and cultural history, focusing on modern and contemporary literature, and ideas of fictionality and non-fictionality. Her research for the first strand of this project is focused on risk in psychosocial institutions and is interested both in the changing legality of psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. The second strand considers ideas of criminality in New Journalism. As part of a third strand of this project she is writing on ideas of risk, women and the state, principally through a reading of the work of Gillian Rose.
Prior to this project she completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, also in the Faculty of English, on loneliness in literature and psychoanalysis. Her articles have been published in Textual Practice, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, New Formations and Journal of American Studies.
