I have degrees in English Literature (BA/MA) and Medical Humanities (MSc with distinction).
My main areas of academic interest are:
- how writers portray consciousness and mental states, particularly Virginia Woolf
- illness narratives, especially narratives about mental illness, emotional distress and disability
- informally-published/handmade texts and artworks, particularly zines about mental illness and/or disability
- visual and material cultures that form around people with mental illness and/or disability
- the relationship between 'DIY published' texts and artworks and 'surviving' mental illness and trauma
- the power of a 'cute aesthetics', the feminism of cuteness
If anyone is interested in these topics and wants to read my work, please contact me.
Portfolio of essays and dissertations
Postgraduate:
- Becoming Visible: Zines about Self-Harm
Original research on portrayals of self-harm in zines from the Wellcome Collection Library archive.
- 'Words Aren't Enough': Phenomenological Approaches to Voice Hearing
Exploring the Hearing Voices Movement and multimedia representations of voice hearing, including video games.
- 'Just a mentally ill girl with a wifi connection': Emotionally-Motivated Texts, Artworks & DIY Publishing
Dissertation analysing informally published texts and artworks with emotional motives for their creation, including zines, blogs and 'Insta poetry'. Explored also how texts and artworks about self-harm and emotional distress often use cuteness to discuss such 'taboo' topics and create communities of care.
- Instigating Affection: Online & Printed Life Writing about Long-Term Health Conditions
Examining the functions of online and printed life writing in the lives of women with long-term health conditions, especially contested and/or under-recognised illnesses.
- Beyond Fragmentation: Autobiographical Graphic Narratives Depicting Childhood Trauma
Exploring how traumatic memories are represented in graphic novels including Alison Bechdel's Fun Home & David Small's Stitches.
- Metaphors for Autism in Fiction and Non-Fiction
Examining three recurrent tropes used to represent autism (the puzzle, the alien and the fortress) and their dangerousness.
"To be solid, quite solid": Rhetorical Patterns of Solidity in Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
Analysing how Woolf and Stein write about solids and liquids as a means of representing different states of consciousness.
Undergraduate:
"In the British Museum there is an enormous mind": Mapping Mindscapes in Virginia Woolf's fiction
Dissertation 1: Exploring how Virginia Woolf writes about physical places as a means of capturing emotional memories, particularly childhood memories and those that are traumatic.
‘If their bodies be cut, with admirable celerity they come together again’: Cutting in Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy
Dissertation 2: Reframing this 'monster' text as a healing work for Burton and exploring the 'cut up text' as pathway to wholeness.
