Ahmed Honeini

I was educated at King’s College London (BA English with Film Studies, 2013), University College London (MA English: Issues in Modern Culture, 2014), and Royal Holloway (PhD English, 2018). My doctoral thesis was on representations of death in the work of William Faulkner. I am an Honorary Research Associate in American Literature. 

Contact me at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Please note that I am unable to supervise PhD students at this time. 

My primary research interests are: 

• American literature, drama, and cinema (1900-present), with an emphasis on William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, and Southern literature; 
• Modernism, postmodernism, and transgressive fiction; 
• Thanatology, death, and violence studies;
• Gender and sexuality studies.

I also have strong secondary research interests in the following areas: 

• The history of the novel, from Defoe to the present;
• The European reception of twentieth century American literature; 
• William Shakespeare; Edgar Allan Poe; Herman Melville; Joseph Conrad; James Joyce; T. S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Federico García Lorca; Ernest Hemingway; Flannery O'Connor; William S. Burroughs; Arthur Miller; Sidney Lumet; James Baldwin; el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X); Stanley Kubrick; Cormac McCarthy; David Cronenberg; Tracy Letts; Paul Thomas Anderson;  and Sarah Kane.

My first monograph, William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound, was published by Routledge in 2021. I have completed my second monograph, entitled Tennessee Williams's America: Homes, Families, Exiles, which is forthcoming with Routledge (2025), and supported by an Authors' Foundation grant from the Society of Authors. I am currently working on two new major projects: a short-form study of James Baldwin's plays, and a monograph on diminished stardom and fame in modern American cinema.

I am also writing a quartet of essays exploring comparisons and confluences between Faulkner and a number of American and European writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Vladimir Nabokov. The first of these, on Faulkner, Hemingway, and World War One, has been published in The Mississippi Quarterly (72.4, 2020). The second of these, on Faulkner, Nabokov, and Lolita, was published in a special issue of The Faulkner Journal on postmodernist literature and transgressive fiction and which I guest edited. The third, on Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and "Annabel Lee," will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays focussing on Faulkner Studies in France. The final essay in the series will compare representations of disability and sibling relations in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Conrad's The Secret Agent. 

Alongside these publications, my account of the current state of European Faulkner Studies was published in a special issue of The Southern Quarterly focussing on Southern Studies in Europe (59.3, December 2022). I have also contributed chapters on Child of God to the edited collection The Evolving Character of Cormac McCarthy (Louisiana State University Press, 2024) and This Side of Paradise to the Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2025). I have been invited to contribute a chapter on Cormac McCarthy and Rockstar Games's Red Dead videogame series to an edited collection celebrating the 40th anniversary of Blood Meridian, and a chapter focussing on puritanism, decadence, and violence in Tennessee Williams in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic. 

I am the founder of Faulkner Studies in the UK, a research network devoted to Faulkner established in 2017. Follow us on Twitter, (@Faulkner_UK), on Bluesky (@faulknerstudiesuk), and on Facebook (@FaulknerUK).

I am the co-Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies. 

Finally, I have been consulted for my expertise in American literature and culture by such media outlets as The Conversation, Refinery29, and Five Books.

I have been teaching in the Department of English since 2017, leading seminars on modules including the history of the novel, literary theory and criticism, and American literature. 

I was invited to create teaching materials and a short video lecture on Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) for the Department's TeacherHub>English initiative for KS4 and KS5 English Literature teachers. 

I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). 

From 2018 to 2020, I was the Department of English's Non-Established Teachers' Representative. 

Conference presentations

Since 2016, I have disseminated my research at numerous conferences, including events held by the Center for Faulkner Studies (2016); the British Association for American Studies (2017); the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society (2017, 2025); the Joseph Conrad Society (2017, 2020); the Hemingway Society (2018); the British Association of Modernist Studies (2019); the Modern Language Association (2021); the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies (2021); the William Faulkner Society (2021, 2024, 2025); the Southern Studies Forum of the European Association for American Studies (2022); the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (2022); and the Tunisian Association of Teachers of English (2024).

Event organisation 

I have also been involved with the organisation of several scholarly events, including numerous Royal Holloway English Department Research conferences, colloquia, and seminars, and the annual Faulkner_UK conference.

The William Faulkner Society; the Modern Language Association (MLA); the British Association for American Studies (BAAS); the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS); the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA); the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; the Hemingway Society; and the Florida Hemingway Society.

Funding awards

I have been awarded various research grants, including from: the English Department at Royal Holloway; the Modern Language Association (MLA); the British Association for American Studies (BAAS); the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS); the John W. Hunt Scholarship for Faulkner Studies from the William Faulkner Society; the Jim and Nancy Hinkle Grant from the Hemingway Society; the John Kuehl Fellowship from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; and an Authors' Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors (SoA).