Research output per year
Research output per year
Accepting PhD Students
PhD projects
I have experience of supervising PhD students working on South Asian diaspora literature, and globalisation and literature.
I welcome research proposals in these areas, and also on questions of narrative and power; literature and cultural difference; literature and the War on Terror; and writing on Muslim minorities in the West.
Research activity per year
My interest in narrative and power began when I was a postgraduate student with a Masters in Twentieth-Century Literature at Sussex. In my dissertation I specialised on the work of J.G. Farrell. For my doctorate, also at Sussex, I undertook a study of narrative and ideology in four British writers on India – Kipling, Forster, Masters and Scott. This became the basis of my first book, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power.
After my DPhil, I taught postcolonial, modern and contemporary literature modules at the Universities of Sussex, Leeds, Worcester, and East London, devising and delivering modules covering literature from the eighteenth century rise of the novel to the present day. I served as subject head, assisted in preparations for REF, oversaw research ethics, and served on various committees. I joined the University of Birmingham as Professor of 20th Century Literature in 2017 and currently teach on modern, contemporary and postcolonial literature modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and supervise PhD students.
My work focuses on minority/majority relations as played out in literary and cultural texts, thinking about the links between those questions of form and content that can also be seen operating in popular narratives about, for example, multiculturalism, secularism and pluralism. I have led three major research projects, applying the analysis of narrative to 'real-world' problems. An interdisciplinary spirit continues to inform my current work which focuses on questions of trust, empathy and interculturalism (the latter understood as a dynamic process, rather than an achieved state or a political programme).
My research explores questions of narrative and power and the authority to represent culturally different others. It primarily examines writing about (and from) the South Asian diaspora in light of the legacies of colonialism and in the contemporary contexts of populist nationalism and the backlash against migrant and minority communities.
I am Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded, Empathy, Narrative and Cultural Values project (2023-2026), which aims to investigate the role of underlying cultural values in the way members of the Birmingham South Asian Muslim community exchange and engage with narratives in health and education settings. Previously, I have led two major research projects: the AHRC-funded Framing Muslims international network (2007-10); and Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue project, funded by the RCUK (2012-15). As a result of this work I have published several books on how intercultural relations are framed in the modern world and the part literature and culture play in this framing. The book that resulted from the first of these projects, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, co-written with Amina Yaqin (Harvard UP, 2011), looked at the way political, journalistic and popular discourses coalesced to paint a unified picture of 'the Muslim Other' in the War on Terror years at the start of the 21st century. The book was nominated for a Grawemeyer Award by Louisville University in 2012 in the religions category.
My first book, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2000, explored the extent to which selected literary texts by writers such as Kipling, Forster, Masters, Scott and Farrell endorse or problematise established discourses of power in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Subsequent books have been about the predicament of the modern diasporic subject, as in my single-author study of the Canadian-based Parsi novelist Rohinton Mistry (Manchester UP, 2004); questions of minority discourse in the collection of essays entitled Alternative Indias: Writing Nation and Communalism (Rodopi, 2006); contemporary Muslim writing in Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing (Routledge 2012); and two collections of cross-disciplinary essays entitled Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics (IB Tauris), and Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism (Palgrave).
My book Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2018) explored how modern anti-Muslim prejudice can be seen as a product of globalised geopolitical interests, refracted – rather than reflected – in literary fiction. The claims often made for a distinct 'Western' culture often place Muslim thought and cultural products at odds with a modernity conceived entirely along Western lines. My book challenges the questionable critical conflation of the novel’s polyphony with the values of post-Enlightenment humanism, and suggested that the in-built prejudices of our secular mode of critique should be recognised as colouring our understanding of works that attempt to convey culturally different experiences and values.
As part of my interrogation of dominant secularist frameworks, in 2023, I co-edited, with Rehana Ahmed, a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on the topic of 'Secularism and the Literary Marketplace', contributing an essay on Omar El Khairy's censored play Homegrown. I have recently completed a monograph on the Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie for the Liverpool University Press 'Writers and their Work' series, which will appear later in 2025.
I am currently exploring the role of empathy in literary texts where cultural difference is a key theme, moving away from the predominant focus on reader responses in empathy studies to consider the formal devices and strategies by which texts demonstrate forms of identification, whether between characters or between narrating figures and a putative, implied reader. The first fruit of this work was a 2023 essay on Sunjeev Sahota's novel Ours are the Streets, published in the journal Studies in the Novel.
Amongst my numerous other published work on twentieth-century and contemporary authors are journal articles on Mohsin Hamid and Mirza Waheed; chapters in the Cambridge Companions to E.M. Forster and Salman Rushdie (both 2007); a chapter on Black British and Asian writing in Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds.) The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. VII: British and Irish Fiction since 1940 (2016); an essay on Hari Kunzru in Len Platt and Sarah Upstone’s Postmodern Literature and Race (2015); a chapter on Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Geoffrey Nash's Orientalism and Literature (2019); an essay on diasporic translocations in Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein's Cambridge History of Black and Asian Writing (2019); and a chapter on 'Rushdie and postmodernism' in Florian Stadtler's Salman Rushdie in Context (2023) forthcoming journal numbers and edited collections.
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Book/Report › Book
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
Morey, P. (Principal Investigator)
Arts and Humanities Research Council
1/12/23 → 8/01/27
Project: Research Councils