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Author: Nadine Muller

I'm Reader in Women's & Gender Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and the creator of The New Academic. I specialise in literary and cultural histories of women, gender, and feminism in Britain from the Victorian period to the present day, with particular interests in the gendered histories of widowhood, feminist historiography, and contemporary women’s writing. I’m currently working on a book called The Widow: A Literary & Cultural History (Liverpool University Press), and I’m the creator of the War Widows’ Stories project. I have a passion for participatory methods, working with people outside of academy, helping them tell their stories, and bringing those stories as well as my research to a wider audience. When I’m not working, I can usually be found outdoors, usually in the Peak District, running and walking with my dogs, or at my favourite bouldering wall.

About My Blog & Me

04/11/2012
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This blog is about academia and me. It’s about academia and you. It’s about sharing my experiences of my profession, and about sharing knowledge and skills which are too often taken for granted. It’s about those academic voices which are either not heard at all, or are not heard enough. It’s about challenging dominant ideas of what academics should look like. It’s about redefining what it takes to be an academic and how academics are expected to present themselves, their lives, and their work. It’s about making ourselves and our profession simultaneously vulnerable and stronger, so that we can help change what makes us feel inadequate, ashamed, or unprofessional. So that we can help make academia more inclusive.

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Brains, Time, Money: An Introduction

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According to HESA statistics for 2011/12, over 45% of UK postgraduates carry out their studies part-time (and 60.8% of part-time postgraduates are female). [1] While there seems to be little to no data on how many – part-time or full-time – are self-funding their postgraduate degree, anecdotal evidence – including the posts which will appear […]

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The Yellow Wallpaper: Women, Medicine & Madness

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  Below you can find the Prezi and the handout I produced for a lecture on The Yellow Wallpaper, which is part of a module on Literature & Madness at LJMU. [gview file=”http://www.nadinemuller.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Madness-The-Yellow-Wallpaper-Lecture.pdf” height=”1400″ width=”960″ save=”1″]

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[Events & Funding] Contemporary Women’s Writing Skills Development Series

01/11/2012
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This AHRC-funded Contemporary Women’s Writing Skills Development Programme (CWWSkills) was a series of six workshops held between August 2013 and July 2014. The programme is designed to enable UK-based postgraduate research students and early-career researchers who work in the field of contemporary women’s writing to develop an entrepreneurial approach to their research.

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Women & Belief, 1852-1928

11/09/2012
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Over recent years, research into religious belief during the Victorian period and the early twentieth century has grown in diversity and importance. The centrality of faith-based discourses to women of the period has long been recognized by scholars in the field. But until now relatively little significance has been attached to the fundamental relationship between women’s faith and women’s rights. This new title in the History of Feminism series remedies that omission. Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a six-volume collection of primary materials covering a wide range of opinions about women, their self-identity, and the combination of their spiritual and political beliefs.

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[Publication] Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminism, & Neo-Victorian Fiction

25/07/2012
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The plot of Sarah Waters’ third novel, Fingersmith (2002), is based on a complex web of matrilineal narratives, which eventually are uncovered as fictions. This essay will analyse these matrilineal fictions in terms of their influences on the novel’s protagonists Sue and Maud, as well as considering the novel’s matrilinealism first as a feminist metaphor for third-wave feminism and secondly as a metafictional device commenting on neo-Victorian fiction’s relationship to the past. Finally, it will highlight the genre’s similarities to third- wave feminism in terms of their shared concern for and treatment of the relationship between past and present.

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[Publication] Dead Husbands & Deviant Women

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Over the past decade, the detective widow has become a well-established character in the little-explored subgenre of neo–Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily series, the author argues, the detective widow investigates the gendered characteristics and complexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting the artistic crimes associated with historical fiction’s imitations and adaptations of the past.

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[Invited Review] Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

24/07/2012
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  Muller, Nadine. Review: Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting by Liedeke Plate (2010). Contemporary Women’s Writing (2012). Online access: http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/11/15/cww.vps020.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=UKMGJOFYO4xBbcb [gview file=”http://www.nadinemuller.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Contemporary-Womens-Writing-2012-Muller-cww_vps020.pdf” height=”1400″ width=”960″ save=”1″]

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