Professor Stewart Mottram

Summary

Stewart Mottram is Professor of Literature and Environment with a research focus on the writing of flood risk regions across time. He leads the AHRC project, From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities and is Consortium Lead for the AHRC (with NERC) Living Well with Water Doctoral Focal Awards in the Arts and Humanities. These awards will support 39 doctoral studentships between 2026-33 to help build healthier, more water-resilient coastal communities in the face of environmental and climate change.

Stewart is Co-Director of the University of Hull's Centre for Water Cultures. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2008-10) and AHRC (2014-15, 2024-25) and was Co-I on the AHRC Risky Cities project at Hull (2020-23).

Stewart collaborates with environmental specialists from across the humanities and sciences to foreground the history of flooding and its role in shaping the literatures and cultures of North Sea regions that continue to live with flood risk today. He also leads the AHRC/XR Stories funded Rising Tide of Humber project, which recreates historical flooding within the Humber estuary using virtual reality in order to raise awareness of today's changing climate (risingtide.hull.ac.uk).

Stewart is author of over 25 publications, including two research monographs and a co-edited collection, and he is particularly recognized for his work on Hull poet, Andrew Marvell (1621-78). His most recent book, ‘Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. His research on Andrew Marvell and medical cures for malaria in seventeenth-century England was first reported in The Observer newspaper in August 2020, and is available to read open access in the journal The Seventeenth Century (2021).

Stewart is also a published poet, and his latest poem, ‘In Search of Appleton’, is out now with Broken Sleep Books as part of a new collection of poems - ‘Companions of his Thoughts More Green’ (2022) - to mark the 400th anniversary of Andrew Marvell’s birth.

Stewart is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), a Fellow of the RSA (FRSA), and a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College.