Stephen Thomas Knight

Stephen Thomas Knight MA (Oxon.) PhD (Sydney). F.A.H.A., F.E.A. (born 21 September 1940) was, until September 2011, a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University in the School of English, Communications and Philosophy; and is currently honorary research professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne in the School of Culture and Communication. His areas of expertise include English literature, medieval literature, cultural studies, crime fiction, Robin Hood and Australian matters. He has published a large number of books, and is well known in the public sphere for his contribution to these and other fields. His most recent books have been The Mysteries of the Cities (2012), Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics (2014) and Reading Robin Hood (2015). New themes are raised in his forthcoming book The Politics of Myth (2015), and he is now working on the many novels of G. W. M. Reynolds, who wrote and sold more books than Dickens, but has been silenced by conventional literary criticism.

Knight was educated at Bournemouth Grammar School and at Jesus College, Oxford. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1962, having specialised in medieval English literature. He was appointed teaching fellow at the University of Sydney in 1963 and lecturer in English in 1964. In 1968–69 he was lecturer in English at the Australian National University. He returned to the University of Sydney in 1970, where he was successively senior lecturer and associate professor. In 1986 he was appointed Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. In 1992 Knight returned to Britain to take up the first chair in English at the new De Montfort University at Leicester. In 1994, he took up a position at Cardiff University as professor and head of English; he was also head of the School of English, Philosophy and Communication, and from 2006 was appointed as distinguished research professor.

Many of Knight's scholarly writings have been in the area of medieval English literature, and he has written extensively on Robin Hood, Merlin and the Arthurian legend in particular. Knight's long-standing interest in crime fiction generated the ground-breaking study Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980), several other books and essay-collections, including Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (1997), for which he was awarded the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award. Knight has produced many reviews for newspapers, magazines and radio, including for ten years from the mid-1970s a monthly column in the Sydney Morning Herald on crime fiction; he has also written sociocultural commentaries, notably the much-discussed The Selling of the Australian Mind.

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