Staff Profile
Dr Fraser Mann
Senior Lecturer
I am a specialist in American writing with particular interests in conflict, testimony, and trauma. I have published research on a range of literary figures such as Ernest Hemingway, James Jones and Norman Mailer. My PhD was completed in 2015 and explored cultures of masculinity in American war fiction.
- School – School of Humanities
- Email – f.mann@yorksj.ac.uk
- Phone – 01904 876 469
- Research - View my work in RaY
- Postgraduate Research Supervisor
Further information
Teaching
My teaching interests include American literature, form and genre, conflict writing, trauma theory, creative nonfiction and gender. I am currently supervising PhD projects on a range of music histories and studies of memory and nostalgia.
I teach on the following modules:
- Forms of Narrative
- Mapping America
- Conflicting Words
- American Radicals
- Gender & Sexuality
- Form and Genre Now
- Research Now 2
Research
I currently work on music writing in the form of creative non-fiction and am a founding member of the Music, Memory, and Narrative Research Group. I co-edited the Bloomsbury edited collection Music, Memory and Memoir (2019), the Equinox collections Venue Stories (2023) and Turntable Stories (forthcoming). My creative writing can be found on the Twistin’ My Memory, Man blogspace. I also work on issues and ideas such as music memoir as an emerging genre, grunge myth, rave memory and shoegaze aesthetics as well as the written work of figures like Mark Lanegan and Kristin Hersh.
Publications
Mann, Fraser (2025) ‘A tidal wave of dopesickness’: Addiction, music and pathography in
Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep’ in Attah, T, Fairclough, K & Lloyd, C (Eds) Popular Music Autobiographies: Rereading Musicians and their Audiences. London. Bloomsbury Academic
Mann, Fraser (2025) ‘Is that R2D2 on vocals?’ Me and the 303. In: Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2025) Turntable Stories. Sheffield, Equinox.
Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2025) Turntable Stories. Sheffield, Equinox.
Mann, Fraser (2023) Finding the Dirt: Nesh at Elektrowerkz. In: Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2023) Venue Stories. Sheffield, Equinox.
Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2023) Venue Stories. Sheffield, Equinox.
Mann, Fraser (2019) “The road bare and white”: Hemingway, Europe and the artifice of ritualised space. Alicante Journal of English Studies, 31. pp. 15-32.
Mann, Fraser (2019) Portrait of the Artist as an Indie Star: Kristin Hersh and the memoir of process. In: Mann, Fraser, Edgar, Robert and Pleasance, Helen, (eds.) Music, Memory and Memoir. London, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 39-51
Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2019) Music, Memory and Memoir. London, Bloomsbury
Edgar, Robert, Mann, Fraser and Pleasance, Helen (2019) Music, Memory and Memoir: Critical and creative engagement with an emerging genre. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 12 (1-2). pp. 181-199.
Mann, Fraser (2013) The dehumanised enemy in the Pacific War novels of Norman Mailer and James Jones. In: Ternès, Anabel, (ed.) Communications: breakdowns and breakthroughs. Interdisciplinary Press
Mann, F. (2012) ‘Never so simple: why we should learn from Mailer’s engagement with complexity’, The Mailer Review, (1), p. 326.
Public engagement
March 2024: York Literature Festival: In conversation with Miki Berenyi
October 2022: Big City Read Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Launch event with Kate Atkinson
October 2020: Black History Month at York St John: An Evening with Jeffrey Boakye
October 2019: York St John Words Matter Annual Lecture: Music Stories
September 2018: York Explore at Tang Hall Library: Pat Barker’ Silence of the Girls – interview with the author
June 2018: Twistin’ My Memory, Man: Music, Memory and Memoir International Conference at York St John- co-organiser
May 2018: University of Sheffield Postgraduate Colloquium 2018: Memory ‘Let others who were there tell their versions: Music, Memory and Memoir’
March 2017: York Literary Festival: An evening with Andy Owen
November 2016: Big City Read: Regeneration: Literary lunch with Pat Barker
October 2016: Big City Read: Regeneration ‘Regeneration to Ruin’, Pat Barker, Kate Atkinson and contemporary war fiction’ -
October 2016: Big City Read Regeneration: Launch event with Pat Barker
June 2014: York Festival of Ideas: Navigating America - Travels in literature and cartography (with Dr Anne-Marie Evans)
Conferences
Academic papers delivered at conference
November 2022: Telling Stories: Manchester Digital Archive: Venue Stories – Curation, Narration and Memory
May 2022: IASPM-US 2022 Conference: Grooves and Movements – Ann Arbor, US (online): Venue Stories: Spatial Narratives of Remembered Sonic Experience
June 2021: 2021 International Autoethnography Conference - Venue Stories: music venues as creative, transformative territories: online
September 2018: Writing the Noise: Second International Subcultures Network Conference – University of Reading, UK. Panel: ‘Music, Memory and Memoir’
April 2018: EBAAS 2018 – King College London, UK. Academic Paper: ‘‘The band is really flying tonight’: creative and cultural space in Kristin Hersh’s Paradoxical Undressing.
July 2017: Storifying the Self – University of Brighton, UK. Panel Paper: ‘Music & Memoir’
April 2017: Fictional First World War – University of Aberdeen, UK. Academic Paper: ‘The road bare and white’: Hemingway’s warscapes and the artifice of ritualised space’
October 2015: Living, Thinking, Writing – An International Conference on the Work of Siri Hustvedt – Birkbeck. Academic paper: ‘No before and no after: Siri Hustvedt and traumatic tradition’
September 2014: Occupation/Liberation: Cultural Representations of 1944-45 and its Legacy – University of Bristol, UK (MHRA funded). Academic paper: ‘“Fitted into a fear ladder” – The paradox of Moral War in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead’
August 2013: “Man-Making Words”: Masculinities, Citizenship and the Nation: 1750 – 1945 – University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK. Academic Paper: ‘This call is meant for you my boy’: William March, Dalton Trumbo and the harrowed masculine self of World War I.’
May 2013: English Graduate Conference – University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Academic Paper: ‘Dear Reader: the letter as textual object in American war fiction’
November 2012: 7th Annual Methodologies Conference – York St John University, York, UK. Academic paper: ‘The Narrative Evolution of the Male Body in the American War Novel’
September 2012: 49th Parallel: Interdisciplinary Conference of North American Studies – University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. Academic paper: ‘It’s Duty Boy: George Creel, John Dos Passos and the Battle of First World War Narrative.’
October 2012: Norman Mailer Society Annual Conference: Norman Mailer - Achievements and Paradoxes – Mailer House, Provincetown, MA, USA. Academic paper: ‘Hidden complexities: dynamics of the masculine group in The Naked and the Dead.’
May 2012: Conflicting Words: Gender, World War and Writing – York St John University, York, UK. A self-organised research seminar involving myself and Dr Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London)
November 2011: Mailer & Jones: Friends & Writers – University of Texas, Austin, USA. Academic paper: ‘The dehumanised enemy in Mailer & Jones’ narratives of conflict.’
November 2011: Probing the Boundaries: Communication & Conflict – Inter Disciplinary.Net, Prague, Czech Republic. Academic paper: ‘Dehumanising the enemy in twentieth-century American war narratives.’
September 2011: Performing Identities in American Literature - University of Durham, Durham, UK. Academic paper: ‘Tim O’Brien and the nature of Vietnam Truth.’
August 2011: Annual Conference of The Society for European Philosophy & The Forum for European Philosophy - York St John University, York, UK. Panel Paper: ‘'Ideology and disillusionment: the influence of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus on reading American war narratives.’
Membership
- British Association of American Studies
- Music Memoir Research Group
