War Widows’ Stories Launches Live on Woman’s Hour

On 11 November 2016, Mary Moreland and I launched the Heritage Lottery Funded project War Widows’ Stories live on Woman’s Hour. We were given eight star-struck minutes with BBC Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, and you can listen to the result below via BBC iPlayer. It’s needless to say I was so excited about being able […]

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[Commentary] The Widow & the Law: A Brief History of Widows’ Pensions in Britain

At a time when we remember the First World War, its victims, and its survivors, it seems apt for me to share some of the research I’ve been doing on the literary and cultural history of the widow in Britain, and particularly on how the state’s support and the economic conditions of widowed women has changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reflects both Britain’s development in terms of gender equality as well as the emergence of the welfare state.

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About My Blog & Me

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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[Publication] Dead Husbands & Deviant Women

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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[Monograph] The Widow: A Literary & Cultural History (1837-1979)

My monograph on the history of widows in Britain will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2017. Here you can find a short summary of the contexts and aims of the book.  Widders are ‘ceptions to ev’ry rule. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)   There are few statements that describe the significance of the figure […]

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