Duncan White PhotoI am Associate Director in the Program in General Education and a lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard University. I joined History & Literature in 2015 and have taught extensively in the concentration, including as a junior tutor and as a senior thesis adviser. I have also served as Assistant Director and Associate Director of Studies in the program. In my HL90 seminar "England After Empire," students learn about the cultural history of the United Kingdom from the end of the Second World War to Brexit, while for the sophomore tutorial I have taught "London: World City" and "Understanding Empire," both of which considered the British Empire and its legacies. My most recent seminar is "Espionage: A Cultural History," in which students think about the representation of spies and spying from Edwardian Britain through the Cold War to the "War on Terror". I have taught as a lecturer in the English department, in which my seminar "The Empire Writes Back: Contemporary Fiction and the Booker Prize," explored the intersection of ideas of postcolonialism and prize culture. I also teach "The Novel and its Contexts," the Capstone English course in the Harvard Extension School.Cover of Cold Warriors

I am the author of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (2019), a history of the literature on both sides of the Iron Curtain, published by Custom House/HarperCollins in the United States and Little, Brown in the United Kingdom. Cold Warriors follows writers including Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright through the conflicts and crises of the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. The book ranges from the Spanish Civil War to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and traces writers' involvement with dissidence, espionage and propaganda. 

My first book, Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. I also co-edited an essay collection, Transitional Nabokov (2009).

As an undergraduate I studied English at Cambridge University before taking a Master's in Russian and East European Literature at University College London. I completed my D.Phil in English at the University of Oxford in 2011, writing a thesis on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov. After four years working as a sports reporter for The Sunday Telegraph in London, I moved to the United States, where I took a position as a Research Fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.

Outside of my teaching and research, I still write occasional pieces for newspapers and magazines. I am a regular book reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, for whom I also write features and interviews, and have also published pieces with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.