The Iris Murdoch Research Centre supports and develops work into this major twentieth century writer. Staff disseminate expertise on Murdoch’s work via published work, major conferences, and more widely via the media. The Centre is the hub for international research, edits and publishes the Iris Murdoch Review journal and other publications, and convenes the Iris Murdoch Society.
Our Research
The Centre’s primary role is to support and develop research, from undergraduate work to world-leading publications.
We fully support the University’s core vision for all research to be filtered into teaching and we see students as co-workers in this venture; Murdoch’s fictional work is taught throughout the undergraduate programme in English.
The research events, seminars, and conferences the centre organises, both at Chichester and beyond, are open to all and our aim is to involve as many people as possible, including the general public, in our work.
The Centre is the home of the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ Series with Palgrave MacMillan, producing two books a year. Miles Leeson and Frances White are the Series Co-Editors. The team also produces the annual Iris Murdoch Review as well as leading the International Iris Murdoch Society and associated activities. The Research Centre has close ties with the Iris Murdoch Society, and you can find its webpage here with much more information, a podcast, a blog and details of how to get involved.
We have a thriving postgraduate cohort and always welcome applications to study.
After initial informal contact you will need to complete the University’s application form.
If you are interested in MPhil or PhD study please contact the Centre Director, Miles Leeson (m.leeson@chi.ac.uk), in the first instance.
Our Members
Dr Miles Leeson is the Director of the IMRC and Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University.
He is the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, co-editor of the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ Series with Palgrave Macmillan and has written widely on Murdoch’s work.
He published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010 and the edited collections Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018), Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (2025), Poems from an Attic: The Selected Poetry of Iris Murdoch (2025) and the forthcoming Handbook of Iris Murdoch (Oxford University Press).
All enquiries for study-related matters should be directed to him in the first instance. Email: M.Leeson@chi.ac.uk
Dr Frances White is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Chichester, Deputy Director of the IMRC, editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, co-editor of the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ Series with Palgrave Macmillan, and Writer in Residence at Kingston University Writing School. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch; her Becoming Iris Murdoch (2014) won the Kingston University Press Short Biography Competition and she recently published Iris Murdoch and Remorse: Beyond Forgiving? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Email: Frances.White@chi.ac.uk
Anne Rowe is Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University. Her publications include The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002); Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life (2010) with Priscilla Martin, and Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 (2015), co-edited with Avril Horner and Iris Murdoch (2019) in the Writers and their Work series from Liverpool University Press. Email: A.Rowe@kingston.ac.uk
Dr Hannah Marije Altorf is Visiting Fellow at the IMRC and was formerly Reader in Philosophy at St Mary’s University, London. She has written on the philosophical and literary works of Iris Murdoch and on different forms of philosophical dialogue. She is the author of Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (2008), and the co-translator of The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch. She is currently involved in the translation of The Fire and the Sun and writing a monograph entitled Thinking in Public: In Dialogue with Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt and others.
Paul Huallah is a Visiting Fellow at the IMRC. He currently resides in Yokohama, Japan and is currently Associate Professor of British Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. EH is currently working on a monograph on Murdoch’s poetry, and has published widely on Murdoch, Christina Rossetti and other literary figures.
Lucy Oulton has worked in the media, education and charitable sectors. She volunteers in the Iris Murdoch Archive where she is transcribing some of Murdoch’s journals. She holds a BA in German Literature and Contemporary Studies from Oxford Brookes University and an MA in English Literature from Kingston University. Her interests include affect theory and ecocriticism and she is now undertaking research into landscape, place and space in the novels of Iris Murdoch. Her first monograph, Wild Iris: Iris Murdoch’s Environmental Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) will be published shortly. Email: Lucyjoutlton@me.com
Maria Peacock has recently completed a thesis titled ‘ “It’s a Subject of our Age”: Uprootedness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction’, in which she considers aspects of post-war displacement as a major theme of her writing. Email: rpeacoc1@stu.chi.ac.uk
Danika Brown is currently working on her PhD entitled ‘Neurodiversity in the works of Iris Murdoch’.
Sita is currently working on a thesis entitled ‘Lessons from Literature: Iris Murdoch and Literary Concepts of Education’.
Besides conducting doctoral research on the influence of Henry James on Iris Murdoch, Robert Cremins writes fiction and essays. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. For 15 years, he lectured on literature in the Honors College at the University of Houston. Robert has very much enjoyed writing for the blog of the IMS website, presenting conference papers on Murdoch’s fiction, and contributing to the Iris Murdoch podcast.
Claudia is an associate member of the IMRC as her PhD is supervised by the Director, Miles Leeson. Her thesis concerns the links between the philosophy of John Locke and the fiction of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. She has previously undertaken research at the Universities of Cardiff and Leeds.
The Iris Murdoch Society
The Iris Murdoch Society was inaugurated in New York in 1986. Barbara Stevens Heusel, then a faculty member at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, organised and chaired the inaugural meeting, on December 29, 1986 in New York City, as a special session at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. It was based at Kingston University until 2016 when it came to the University of Chichester, and is now run by the Research Centre. It has members across the world: academics, general readers and enthusiasts, and those personally connected to Iris Murdoch. It exists to promote her work, further her philosophical vision, and enhance and extend knowledge. There is an active online community connected to the society on Facebook.
Privacy Policy
The Iris Murdoch Society will keep personal data that you have submitted for 18 months. We use the data to send you your journal subscription, to tell you about events and publications that might interest you and to send up to two reminders once your membership has elapsed. We will never share your information with a third party. You can request to check what data we are holding about you, and request to be removed from our records entirely, at any time.
If you wish to complain about any aspect of our information rights practice you may do so by contacting the Information Commissioner’s Office. The University of Chichester’s data protection policies can be found on our Policies page.
The Iris Murdoch Review
The IMRC produces the Iris Murdoch Review each year which publishes articles on the life and work of Iris Murdoch and her milieu. For more details please visit the link to the Iris Murdoch Society above.