Dr Williams' research interests include:

• literature and culture of the pre-1945 period;
• special emphasis on H.G. Wells and James Joyce;
• interdisciplinary interests, especially in writing and cinematicity, documentary and reportage.

AHRC funded studentships are available in these research areas - more details.

He is currently supervising AHRC-funded doctoral research projects on 'The Multi-layered Image in Film: Silent Cinema, Art Cinema and Intertextuality' and 'To Live through the Lens - The Novels and Screenplays of Alan Sharp', among others. He is also supervising a new PhD project on the Science Fiction of Robert Duncan Milne, awarded an AHRI International Research Scholarship.

He is convenor for MLitt in Science Fiction Studies and tutors for the first semester core module and option on Scientific Romance.

Dr Williams was director of the School of Humanities Research Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures (January 2017-August 2019), the main research centre for Literary Studies, Film, Drama and Creative Writing. His research and public engagement has also played a major part in Dundee's role as the Scottish Hub for the UK's annual national festival of the Humanities: Being Human.

Dr Williams is Chair of the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG) which researches aspects of the relationship between verbal and visual representation and holds its annual conferences in early summer. He is also a member of the Executive Board of IAWIS/AIERTI and of the editorial board of the Wellsian: the Journal of the H.G. Wells Society.

SWIG hosted the major international conference, ‘Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image’, the 10th Triennial Conference of the International Association for Word and Image Studies / Association Internationale pour Étude des Rapports entre Texte et Image (IAWIS/AIERTI) at the University of Dundee (11-15 August 2014). See: http://www.scottishwordimage.org/conferences/iawis2014/index.htm

Essays from the conference have been published as Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery (Brill, 2019).

He has another monograph forthcoming on James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (Edinburgh UP, June 2020).