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 literature and ‘cinematicity’
• Rediscovering the ‘lost’ work of Scottish-born science fiction pioneer, Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99)

He has recently supervised doctoral research projects (several AHRC-funded) on:

• ‘Neuroliterary Theory’
• ‘Gynotopian Writing’
• 'The Multi-layered Image in Film: Silent Cinema, Art Cinema and Intertextuality'
• 'To Live through the Lens - The Novels and Screenplays of Alan Sharp'
• ‘James Joyce and the Stream of Consciousness’
• ‘The Films of the Cohen Brothers’
• ‘The Films and Novels of Emeric Pressburger’.
• ‘Katherine Mansfield and Visual Culture’
• ‘Cinema and the Fiction of James Barke’
• Co-supervised a visiting PhD researcher from Italy, based at the University of Perugia, on ‘James Joyce and Comics’ (passed June 2025).
• He is currently co-supervising a PhD project on ‘Henry Miller and Cinema’

Dr Williams convened Dundee’s MLitt in Science Fiction, tutoring its core module and options on early period science fiction and scientific romance. He is on the editorial board of The Wellsian: The Journal of the H.G. Wells Society. Dr Williams is a member of the International James Joyce foundation, the British Society for Literature and Science, and the Magic Lantern Society of the UK and Ireland.

Dr Williams was director of the School of Humanities’ Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures, the main research centre for Literary Studies, Film, Drama and Creative Writing, before Humanities was amalgamated with Social Sciences and Law. His research and public engagement on H.G. Wells, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, James Joyce, Robert Duncan Milne and George Orwell, as well as creative collaborations, 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’, over several years.

Dr Williams chaired the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG), researching aspects of the relationship between verbal and visual representation and holding annual conferences for many years. He has also served as a member of the Executive Board of IAWIS/AIERTI.

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 (Leiden and Boston: 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 includes a 10,000-word general intro and 5x 500-word thematic cluster intros. This critical edition is the first major outcome of a collaborative, transatlantic project to recover and republish all of this Scottish-American writers work from the late 19th century, 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.

Dr Williams most recent monograph is James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (Edinburgh UP, 2020; paperbacked 2022): James Joyce and Cinematicity

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:

• ‘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, 2024).
• ‘Magic Lanternism and Joyce’s “Linguistic Palette”’, chapter in an international collection based on exhibitions of artist Werner Schmidt’s work on James Joyce und die Farben des Ulysses/ James Joyce and the Colours of Ulysses, ed. Jakob Brüssermann, Janusz Czech, Christoph Poetsch and Werner Schmidt (Berlin: Dr. Cantz'sche Verlag, 2025). This book won a major award from the German Government Department for Culture and Media for independent publishing: Die Preisträger 2025 - Der Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
• With Chris Murray as script writer and artwork by Norrie Millar and Monty Nero, he edited a 64-page comic: Robert Duncan Milne’s Tales from the Argonaut (Dundee: UniVerse, 2025).
• 2,000-word joint article with Chris Murray, ‘Robert Duncan Milne - Visualising the Science Fiction of a “lost” Scottish Pioneer, in Newsletter of the Scottish Society for Art History 78 (Summer 2025): 11-15.
• ‘Looking beyond the Mutoscope: Cinematicity in ‘Nausicaa’, 7,000-word article in Modernism/Modernity1 (January 2024), pp.45-64.
• ‘The Cyclopean Eye: Charity Bazaars, Cinematicity and Defamiliarised Vision in Ulysses’, 7,000-word article in James Joyce Quarterly60th anniversary double number: Vol. 60.1-2 (Fall 2022-Winter 2023), pp.75-95.

 Forthcoming publications include:

• ‘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, 2026).
• With Cleo Hanaway-Oakley at the University of Bristol, Dr Williams has edited an illustrated volume of 36 chapters by leading scholars on Joyce, commissioned by Edinburgh University Press for their Companions to Writers and the Arts series (forthcoming 2026). He also co-wrote its introduction and contributed a chapter 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 originally staged in Dundee at the Steps Theatre, at the James Joyce Symposium in Dublin and the Modernist Studies Association conference in Bristol. In 2025 the show was revived with live musical accompaniment, singing and acting by local performers at James Joyce’s high school, Belvedere College, as the highlight of the annual Bloomsday Film Festival, organised by film maker Tommy Creagh and the Dublin James Joyce centre. Dr Williams was all expenses paid ‘guest of honour’ at the festival, based on his research and creative collaboration on Joyce and cinematicity. He also gave a joint lecture at the James Joyce centre with Dr Brooker, as well as presenting a programme of surviving films from Joyce’s Cinematograph Volta at the Irish Film Institute, with film historian Denis Condon. See:

• The programme for the 2025 Bloomsday Film Festival is out now
• Irish Film Institute -FROM THE VAULTS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BLOOMSDAY FILM FESTIVAL: A VOLTA CINÉ CONCERT