Modern fiction, memory, and the digital condition
Nineteen books. Grants from the AHRC, Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. A research career that treats literature as a way of thinking through technological change, not just a subject to study in spite of it.
Research interests
Modern and Contemporary Fiction in English · Digital Humanities · Cognition, the Senses and Memory · Digital Culture, Health and Inequality · Computational Literary Studies · Computational Linguistics · Creativity and Wellbeing · Unconscious Biases in Culture and Society · Place and Space · Neuroaesthetics · Medical Humanities · Gender Studies · Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity.
Authored & edited volumes
The Prosthetic God: Transactive Cognition in the Digital Age
Posthuman Plunder: Being Human on the Brink of Civilization
Computational Literary Studies: An Introduction
Towards Digital Justice: New Critical Perspectives on Digital Inequality from the Humanities
Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon
Writing under Fire: Poetry and Prose from Ukraine and the Black Country
Right in the Head: My Stroke Journey
A personal exploration of trauma combining psychogeography, the neuronovel, and memoir to investigate the relationship between brain and identity after stroke.
Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country
British Fiction in the Sixties
Memory in the Twenty-First Century
Women's Fiction and Post 9/11 Contexts
Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
The Making of London
Kazuo Ishiguro: Critical Visions of the Novels
Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
McLiterature: Interviews with Writers about Globalization
“As teacher, writer and editor, Sebastian Groes is one of the most interesting figures of his generation.” — Ian McEwan
Reviewers on Right in the Head: My Stroke Journey
“A highly enjoyable, multi-perspectival stroke memoir that is trenchant and critical about the way ‘neuromania’ — like ‘genomania’ before it — leads people into a bogus search for a total explanation. Very engaging.” — Will Self
“Bas Groes has returned from illness with deepened and expanded empathy, hope, and appreciation of the glorious challenges that beset humanity.” — Niall Griffiths
“At once touchingly intimate and wide-ranging… a book about the mystery of consciousness, the workings of the brain, creativity, and the overcoming of adversity.” — Adam Roberts
Selected journal articles & chapters
‘Great Minds Think Alike, right? The Synergistic Effects of Dialectical Collaboration on the Authorial Styles of Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’
‘Artificial “Friends”: Anglo-Japanese Perspectives on Biases in AI’
Contribution to the UK House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee report, Better prisons: less crime
‘The COVID-19 Pandemic and Fake News’
‘Emerging Themes in STARTS Methodologies’
‘Exploring Third Spaces in Art-Science’
‘Health Warnings: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis’
Introduction to ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and International Crisis’
‘Proust in Transylvania: Smell and Memory in Romania’
‘Consciousness in the Work of Jim Crace’
‘Information Overload in Literature’
‘I Love Alaska: Posthuman Subjectivity and Memory on the Final Frontiers of Our Ecology Crisis’
‘Proust and Memory in Tom McCarthy's Remainder’
A small selection of the wider body of work is shown here. The full list, including journalism, creative writing, podcasts and interviews, is available on request.
Funded research
Fifteen-plus competitive awards from UKRI/AHRC, the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, and international foundations.
| 2026 | Horizon ECR Grant: Using Computational Literary Studies to understand the impact of language and cognition after stroke (with Dr Lamyk Bekius, Antwerp; Prof. Jan Rybicki, Jagiellonian) — result expected April 2027 | £864,000 |
| 2026 | AHRC Curiosity: CLSUK — a computational literary studies infrastructure for the UK | £100,000 |
| 2025 | Black Country Living Museum: Unlocking Inclusive Cultures Fund | £10,000 |
| 2024 | Arts Council England: Write in the Head — creative writing for stroke survivors | £30,000 |
| 2023 | Arts Council England: The Big Bookshare — a mass book club in UK prisons | £20,000 |
| 2022 | Daiwa Foundation UK: UN/REAL — Anglo-Japanese perspectives on digital health and wellbeing | £12,000 |
| 2020 | AHRC Standard Grant: Novel Perceptions — towards an inclusive canon | £295,000 |
| 2020 | Being Human Festival (AHRC/BA/SAS): Hub Award | £4,290 |
| 2019 | Internal Wolverhampton fund: International Research and Innovation Scheme (IRIS), Co-I | £76,100 |
| 2012 | AHRC International Research Network, PI with Co-I Prof. Patricia Waugh | £45,000 |
Full grant history, including Wellcome Trust, Japan Foundation, and earlier Being Human Festival awards, available on request.
Doctoral supervision
Current and recent projects include work on computational analysis of post-9/11 feminist fiction, the post-partition novel in Indian women's writing, the network novel, Black disability in the digital age, and queer Hong Kong poetry — alongside completed doctorates including Isabel Waidner's experimental novel BLAHG, later published as Gaudy Bauble (Dostoyevsky Wannabe Press, 2017).
I have examined over a dozen PhDs across the UK (Liverpool, Gloucestershire, University of London, Glasgow, Nottingham) and internationally, at the University of Amsterdam, Lucian Blaga University Romania, and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.