Women On Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then

As part of my role as one of this year’s New Generation Thinkers, I’ve recorded an edition of BBC Radio 3’s The Essay! “Women on Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then” will be broadcast on 11 November 2015 at 10.45PM, and you can listen anytime after this by visiting BBC iPlayer. [iframe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10j 900 […]

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Free Thinking: New Generation Thinkers 2015 Launch at the Hay Festival

I’m very excited to say that I’ve recorded my first ever radio broadcast, and you’ll be able to listen to this edition of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking on Thursday, 28 May 2015 at 10PM. This edition of the programme introduces four of this year’s New Generation Thinkers, including me. [iframe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05w8135 1050 1300]

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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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[Commentary] For the Sake of the Children: Widows & Welfare in the 1960s

In the post-war decades, Britain prided itself on the new welfare state and the support it afforded children and mothers. But what about those women who had lost their husbands in the war? This post looks at the picture painted by two sources from the 1960s: a broadcast on child welfare by the Central Office of Information (1962) and a BBC Home Service radio broadcast called “World of the Widow” (1960).

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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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