Dr John Harvey

John is a Life Fellow, and Emeritus Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University's Faculty of English.

Biography

John Harvey is a prize–winning novelist and a literary critic who writes also on visual art. After reading English at Magdalene College, Cambridge he came to Emmanuel as a Research Fellow in 1967. He taught as a Lecturer then Reader in the University’s English Faculty and he was for many years Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel, where he has also served as a Tutor, Praelector and as Vice–Master. He organized art exhibitions at Emmanuel (including the noted Moscow in Cambridge exhibition of 1990), and even drew the lion that gamboled on the College crockery for many years.

Research and Literature

His novel The Plate Shop (1979), about life in an engineering works, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize. Other novels cover the worlds of military dictatorship, road–haulage and motor–racing, a Victorian art scandal, and the political adventures of the great painter Rubens. In 2021 all five of his novels were reissued in a uniform paperback edition and on Kindle. He has written two books on the meanings through history of the colour black, in men’s clothing (Men in Black, 1995) and in culture at large (The Story of Black, 2013). Otherwise, his principal visual studies are Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (1970), Clothes (2008), and The Poetics of Sight (2015). He has reviewed widely in the national press and given invited lectures to audiences ranging from the Getty Centre in Los Angeles to the Praesidium of the Russian Academy of Fine Art in Moscow. He has twice been a Visiting Professor in Japan, at the universities of Chiba and Sapporo.