Dr Rob Hawkes joined Teesside University in October 2012, having taught previously at the University of York (2005-2009), the University of East Anglia (2009-2010), and Leeds Trinity University (2010-2013). He completed his BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool, his MA in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, and his PhD in English at the University of York. His thesis examined the fiction of the British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) in relation to theories of character, plot, genre, and trust.

Rob is a member of the Executive Committee of the Ford Madox Ford Society and is the Society’s Publicity and Website Officer.

In September 2012, he co-organised a major international conference on Ford’s First World War modernist masterpiece Parade’s End, which has recently been republished in a four-volume critical edition by Carcanet Press and been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard. The conference programme included a Q&A session with Susanna White, the director of the adaptation, and Rupert Edwards, the producer/director of Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford? A Culture Show Special.

Rob’s research is founded on interests in modernism and modernity, literature and trust, war writing, and narrative theory.

He is the author of: Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and co-editor of: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity (Rodopi, 2014); War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Modernism, and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford (Routledge, 2015).

Rob is currently working on a major new book-project entitled Trusting Texts: Literature, Money, and Modernity, 1890-1990. This work focuses on the issues of trust and finance in modern and postmodern literature, making interdisciplinary connections between literature, economics, sociology, and politics, and examining texts by writers ranging from George Gissing, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh to Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, Thomas Pynchon, B. S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, Angela Carter, and Jeannette Winterson.

In 2013, he co-founded Cultures of Trust, an international interdisciplinary network of researchers with interests in questions of trust and distrust, confidence, faith, risk, sincerity, authenticity, money, modernity, and language and its (mis)uses. The network was launched at the Spring 2014 Northern Modernism Seminar.

Rob welcomes enquiries from prospective research students on topics such as modernism, the First World War, Ford Madox Ford and his literary networks, modernity, trust, and authenticity.