ALUS President & Åbo Akademi University/University of Turku, Finland Jason Finch: “From Liverpool to St Louis: Weakness, Simultaneity and Writing in Post-Industrial Cities”

Jason Finch studied at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford, UK, and received his doctorate from Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU), Finland with a dissertation published as E.M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography (2011). Currently, he is Assistant Professor in English Literature at ÅAU and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, both in Finland. His research focuses on Anglophone urban literatures, chiefly of the UK and USA, in the period 1820-1970, currently more precisely on a literary history of the London ‘slum’, and on mediations of the urbanity of British and US cities which boomed in the nineteenth century, including Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, St Louis and Memphis. Moreover, he has developed a more general theory of the relationship between literature and place, set out in his book Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (2016). Jason is a co-founder and currently President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS).