Rate My Professor Gill Plain

Professor Gill Plain is Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, where she serves as Director of Research. She joined St Andrews in 1998 and was promoted to Professor in 2006, having previously held her first academic post at the University of Glamorgan from 1993 to 1998. She served as Head of the School of English from 2014 to 2017. Plain holds a PhD in English from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1993), an MA from the University of Cambridge, and an undergraduate degree in History and English from Cambridge. Her research spans twentieth-century literature and culture, with particular focus on mid-twentieth-century Britain, literary and cinematic responses to total war, crime fiction emphasizing gender, sexuality, and the body, postwar rehabilitation narratives, masculinities, disability discourses, and scientific modernity.

Plain has an extensive publication record, including monographs such as Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1996), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001), John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (2006), Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013), and Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity in the Aftermath of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has also published Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) and edited collections including A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (with Susan Sellers, 2007), Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Bannockburn (2016), and British Literature in Transition 1940-1960: Postwar (2018). In 2026, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She has delivered invited keynotes on Agatha Christie, postwar masculinities, and crime fiction, and contributes as a journal editor.