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.

He has 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', among others. He is also supervising PhD projects on the Science Fiction of Robert Duncan Milne, awarded an AHRI International Research Scholarship, James Joyce and the Stream of Consciousness and a History of Gynotopias.

He is convenor for MLitt English Studies ‘internal pathway’ in Science Fiction and tutors for the first semester core module and options early period science fiction and film.

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 has chaired 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). 

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

His most recent monograph is James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (Edinburgh UP, 2020), which has received excellent reviews in leading journals in the field: The James Joyce Quarterly, James Joyce Broadsheet, Irish Studies Review, etc.

Dr Williams’s forthcoming publications include:

• ‘Looking beyond the Mutoscope: Cinematicity in ‘Nausicaa’, Modernism/Modernity (forthcoming in 2022).
• ‘The Cyclopean Eye: Charity Bazaars, Cinematicity and Defamiliarised Vision in Ulysses’, for the James Joyce Quarterly (forthcoming in 2022).
• ‘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. Published for the centenary of Joyce’s novel in 2022, 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 Arts series (estimated publication date: 2023/4). He is also co-writing the introduction and contributing a chapter (with illustrations) on ‘Joyce and Pre-Filmic Visual Media’.
• With PhD student Ari Brin, is currently co-editing a critical edition of selected stories by Robert Duncan Milne, the ‘lost Scottish father of translatlantic science fiction’.

With Dr Jeremy Brooker, chair of the Magic Lantern Society of the UK and Ireland, Dr Williams has devised a live collaborative show to demonstrate the influence of Victorian lanternism on Joyce’s fiction based on his latest monograph. This public talk and entertainment will be staged (among other venues) in Dundee, at the James Joyce Symposium in Dublin in June 2022, to mark the centenary of Ulysses, and also at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Bristol later the same month, if Covid conditions remain favourable.