Rate My Professor Siobhan Campbell

Siobhan Campbell is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing Practice in the Department of English and Creative Writing within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University. She earned a first-class MA from University College Dublin, a PhD from Lancaster University, and completed postgraduate studies at New York University and the New School in New York. Her career includes serving as Associate Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London, where she directed the MA and MFA programs in Creative Writing, and as Visiting Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She has delivered lectures and readings at institutions such as Johns Hopkins, University of Missouri, Berkeley, UMASS Amherst, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

Campbell's research specializations encompass the lyric poem, nature poem, and socially engaged poetry that bridges divides, particularly in post-conflict contexts like Northern Ireland. She examines how art counters rhetoric of power and develops creative writing pedagogies for interventions in high-pressure environments. Collaborating with NGOs, the UN in Iraq and Lebanon, military families, veterans, and NHS frontline workers, her projects include the AHRC-funded Expressive Writing and Telling in Crisis in Aakar governorate, Lebanon (2020-2021), as Principal Investigator, and Beyond do no harm: Life Writing and Expressive Writing after sexual violence in conflict (2016), as Co-Investigator with Beyond Borders and INMAA. These efforts have established the Expressive Creative Writing paradigm, adopted by third-sector organizations, and contributed to initiatives like hospital writer's nooks through OU research on creative writing benefits. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Heat Signature (2017) and Cross-Talk, with Cowslip Weather forthcoming from Seren in 2025. She co-edited Eavan Boland: Inside History (2016) and publishes in journals such as Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Agenda, and Magma Poetry, appearing in anthologies like Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe), Women's Work (Seren), and The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (NYU Press). Major awards include the National Poetry Competition, Troubadour International Poetry Prize, Arts Council award, Templar Poetry Prize, and Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Prize (2016).