Staff profile

I joined the English Department as a PhD candidate in October 2010. Supervised by Prof. Pat Waugh, my research investigates the intertextual relationship between contemporary women writers - including Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel, Pat Barker and A. S. Byatt - and earlier twentieth century female authors - e.g. Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. It is through these relationships that I examine and question still pervasive heavily gendered models of influence, including Harold Bloom's agon as well as a more object relational model put forward by feminist psychoanalysis and clearly influenced by Woolf. Do women writers any longer need to 'think back through their mothers'? How far was this always, in the twentieth century, an ambivalent process? How far might one accept the Bloomian agon as an appropriate model for relations and dialogues between women writers? Has the post-structuralist turn 'undone' the idea of the woman writer as a distinctive category? These are some of the questions I attempt to answer.

I received my MA from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Poland. I am also an editor of Inkapture - a new creative writing magazine published by a collective of writers based in the city of Durham.