Dr Williams's research interests include:

• Literature and culture of the pre-1945 period, especially scientific romance and modernist fiction
• Special emphasis on H.G. Wells and James Joyce
• Interdisciplinary and intermedial interests, especially in writing and ‘cinematicity’
• Rediscovering the ‘lost’ work of Scottish-born science fiction pioneer, Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99)
• He has recently supervised AHRC-funded doctoral research projects on ‘Katherine Mansfield and Visual Culture’, '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', as well as on ‘James Joyce and the Stream of Consciousness’,  ‘The Films of the Cohen Brothers’ and ‘The Films and Novels of Emeric Pressburger’.
• He is currently supervising PhD projects on the Science Fiction of Robert Duncan Milne (awarded an AHRI International Research Scholarship), Henry Miller and Cinema and a History of Gynotopia. Co-supervised a visiting PhD researcher from Italy, based at the University of Perugia, on James Joyce and Comics (submitted June 2024).

Dr Williams convened Dundee’s MLitt in Science Fiction and tutored its core module and options on early period science fiction and scientific romance.

He was director of the School of Humanities Research Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures, the main research centre for Literary Studies, Film, Drama and Creative Writing, before Humanities was amalgamated into a new school with Social Sciences and Law. His research and public engagement 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 has chaired the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG) which researched aspects of the relationship between verbal and visual representation and held annual conferences for many years. He has also served as a member of the Executive Board of IAWIS/AIERTI and is on 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). 

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

In January 2025, Dr Williams published The Essential Robert Duncan Milne: Stories by the Lost Pioneer of Science Fiction, co-edited with Ari Brin, for Bloomsbury Academic. This critical edition is the first major outcome of a long-term collaborative, transatlantic project to recover and republish all of Milne’s work, so it never slips through the cracks in literary history again. The book showcases the astonishing ways in which Milne pre-imagined the networked, online, media-driven world of today and the increasing benefits and risks of disruptive technoscience.

His most recent monograph is James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (Edinburgh UP, 2020; paperbacked 2022). This has received excellent reviews in leading journals in the field: The James Joyce Quarterly, James Joyce Broadsheet, James Joyce Literary Supplement Irish Studies Review, Dublin Review of Books, etc.

Dr Williams’s other recent publications include:

• ‘Looking beyond the Mutoscope: Cinematicity in ‘Nausicaa’, 7,000 word article in Modernism/Modernity 31.1 (January 2024), pp.45-64.
• ‘The Cyclopean Eye: Charity Bazaars, Cinematicity and Defamiliarised Vision in Ulysses’, 7,000 word article in James Joyce Quarterly 60th anniversary double number: Vol. 60.1-2 (Fall 2022-Winter 2023), pp.75-95.

Forthcoming publications include:

• ‘Moreau > Morel > Marienbad: From Beast Folk to Apparitions of the Living in H.G. Wells, Adolfo Bioy Casares and the Cinema’ (6,000 words), in G. Wells: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Lourdes López-Ropero (Salamanca: University of Salamanca Press, 2025).
• ‘H.G. Wells, Cinema and Related Media’ (7,500 words), in The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells, ed. Duncan Bell and Sarah Cole (Oxford: OUP, 2025).
• ‘Magic Lanternism and Joyce’s “Linguistic Palette”’, to accompany major international exhibition by painter and photographer Werner Schmidt on ‘The Colours of Ulysses‘, at the A.K.T. Pforzheim. Forthcoming in a two-volume set, ed. Jakob Brüssermann, Janusz Czech, Christoph Poetsch and Werner Schmidt.
• With leading Joyce scholar Cleo Hanaway-Oakley at Bristol University, Dr Williams is co-editing a volume of 35 essays on Joyce, commissioned by EUP for their prestigious Writers and the Artsseries (forthcoming 2025/26). He is also co-writing the introduction and contributing a chapter (with illustrations) on ‘Joyce and Pre-Filmic Visual Media’.

With Dr Jeremy Brooker, chair of the Magic Lantern Society of the UK and Ireland, Dr Williams has devised several live collaborative shows. The most recent demonstrated the influence of Victorian lanternism on Joyce’s fiction based on Dr Williams’s latest monograph and to mark the centenary of Ulysses in 2022. This talk and entertainment was staged in Dundee at the Steps Theatre, at the James Joyce Symposium in Dublin, and the Modernist Studies Association conference in Bristol.