[Publications] Feminisms, Sex and the Body

From Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for chastity as a universal rather than a female virtue in A vindication of the rights of woman (1792), through nineteenth and early-twentieth century writings on the commodification of women in marriage and prostitution and campaigns for rational dress, to fights for women’s reproductive rights and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the female body and female sexuality as sites of oppression and empowerment have long occupied a central place of concern in feminist theory and practice. In the new millennium, as in previous decades, this interest continues to engender productively diverse and conflicting, as well as often conflicted, responses by feminist scholars across disciplines whose work reflects upon and attempts to conceptualise women’s sexual bodies within the cultural and political landscapes of the twenty-first century.

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Making Meaning: Author, Reader, Text

This is the second lecture in our second-year theory core module, and it introduces students to theories on the relationships between authors, readers, texts, and their meaning. Below you can find the the handout for this lecture. Prezi to follow!

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E-Musings: Social Media, Learning & Assessment

Several of the modules my department offers its undergraduate students have, as part of their assessment strategy, an online participation element, either via blogs, or – and this is what this post is concerned with – discussion boards within our virtual learning environment. Rather naively perhaps, I assumed that students would appreciate this “innovative” mode […]

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Giving Conference Presentations

No matter if as part of a seminar or a postgraduate conference at your own university, as part of your job interview, or as a requirement for your annual progress review as a doctoral student, at some point in your academic life you will – for better or worse, some might say – be asked […]

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

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

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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