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Research title "Impudent Scribblers": Place and the unlikely heroines of the interwar years. Summary of research PhD awarded 2010
Current work and areas of interest
2011: Shortlisted for the Julia Briggs Memorial Essay Prize run by the Virginia Woolf Society. Title: The “Strange Spaces of Silence” and Virginia Woolf’s Imaginative Feminism
In 2010, I developed and taught a pilot programme for Level 4 undergraduate students, 2010: Geographical Writing , a series of 10 workshops designed to develop confidence in writing, exploring creative ways to write about geography.
Students produced a portfolio of writing and gave readings to staff and postgraduates.
2009-2010 Tutor for the Faculty Postgraduate course, Qualitative Methods
PGTA 2009-2010 teaching undergraduate levels 1, 2 and 3 in the core geography course
Co-author of the Level 2 Tutorial Handbook for the core geography undergraduate course
2008-2009 Tutor for the Faculty Postgraduate Course, Qualitative Methods
2006-2010 PGTA with various teaching duties in Levels 1-3 of the undergraduate core geography course
Current research interests
Spiritual and Sacred Landscapes
Pilgrimage
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Medieval Mystics (paper presented at RGS/IBG, 2010 - “A manner of sownde”: Margery Kempe, spiritual and textual practice)
Environment, well-being and creative writing
Food security and sustainable practice
Producer member of the Wholesome Food Association (WFA). The WFA is a network of growers, processors, suppliers and distributors of authentic, locally-grown, wholesome food. It is a campaigning organisation, promoting smaller-scale, sustainable food production. See http://www.wholesome-food.org.uk
PhD:
The funding for my research was secured by the award of a scholarship from the Faculty of Law, Business and Social Sciences running from October 2005 to October 2007.
PhD research
The central focus of the thesis is the storytelling of place and the place of storytelling. These elements comprise the geoliterary terrains of narrative, the cultural matrix in which texts are sited, produced and received, including the lifeworld of the author. The texts under scrutiny in this research have been written by women during the interwar years of the 20th Century in Britain and Australia. One of the primary aims of the thesis was to explore the geoliterary terrains (including the space known as the middlebrow) of certain texts in light of their relative neglect by contemporary critics in comparison with the prominence given to works written by men during this period. Analysis of the texts through the lens of locational feminism (Friedman, 1998, p.5) provides the framework for an interdisciplinary inquiry that draws on geography, feminist literary criticism, social history, theology and new historicism.
The substantive themes of domesticity, home and nation are found to be embedded in these works and in the lifeworlds of their authors. Located within these themes is a mapping out of spiritual, psychological and emotional landscapes and how they are configured within imaginative literature.
The critical neglect of the texts is sited within a set of cultural and material practices that marginalised women writers during this period. This marginalisation is in turn located within a longer historical practice of attempting to silence women’s narratives. Operating beside/against these practices are the imperative of storytelling and women’s ‘will to be known’ through narrative.
Main texts and authors:
Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
A Charmed Circle by Anna Kavan
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Invaluable Mystery by Lesbia Harford
High Rising by Angela Thirkell
Other authors include: Vera Brittain, Lettice Cooper, E.M. Delafield, Miles Franklin, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Vita Sackville-West, Christina Stead, D.E. Stevenson and Dorothy Whipple.
“Identity is literally unthinkable without narrative… people know who they are through the stories they tell about themselves and others” (S. Friedman, 1998, Mappings:Feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter, Princeton University Press, NJ, p.8)
Earlier Research
Looking-glass Country: the geo-literary terrain of Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. This work was a dissertation submitted as part of an MRes in Human Geography (University of Glasgow). The work focuses on the depiction of the East Anglian Fens in Sayers’ novel, drawing also on other texts on the Fens such as Graham Swift’s Waterland (1982). It explores the ways in which geoliterary terrains construct and symbolise social worlds.
Women and Educational Leadership . This research was submitted as part of a Master’s degree in Educational Administration and Policy (Monash University, Melbourne). The work analysed and examined levels of gender bias operating within bureaucratic structures of educational administration and the exclusion of women in the areas of policy development and recruitment.
Other recent work
Judge for the inaugural Barbara Reynolds Award, 2009
White Food, Red Food , fiction. Shortlisted for the Scotsman/Orange Short Story Award, 2004 and included in the anthology North, edited by Jackie Kay (Polygon).
The Salt Wife (fiction): runner-up prize for Women Writers Network Flash Fiction, November 2006
Mysterious Academe: Dorothy L. Sayers and Ruth Dudley Edwards; Academic Mysteries 101 (2006), Mystery Readers Journal 22, 3, Fall
Editor of Josephine Tey: A celebration (2004), a festchrift to celebrate the life and works of Scottish author, Josephine Tey, including contributions from authors Andrew Taylor, Jessica Mann, Catherine Aird and Natasha Cooper.
Reviews of non-fiction works of history including: Lisa Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London ; Following the Drum: The lives of Army wives and daughters by Annabel Venning; The Longest Night: 10-11 May 1941, Voices form the London Blitz by Gavin Mortimer. Reviews of literary historical fiction by authors Thomas Keneally, Philip Hensher, Philippa Gregory, Sara George et al., published in Review, the review journal of the Historical Novel Society (www.historicalnovelsociety.org ).
From 2006: Editor of Sidelights on Sayers, the journal of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society; editor of the Conference Proceedings of the annual society conference.
Other publications include: non-fiction writing and editing on various aspects of early 20th Century fiction by women, reviews and haiku poetry.
Shortlisted for the regional final of the Faber & Faber/Waterstone’s (2005) prize for children’s fiction for the novel Kirrhi Loxo is Missing.
Supervisors Professor Joanne Sharp
Professor Chris Philo
None Recent publications Perriam, G. (2004), Sex, Sweet Danger and the fairy tale, CLUES 23, 1, pp. 41-48 Perriam, G. (2008), Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere,
Cultural and Social History - Journal of the Cultural and Social History Society , 5, 3, pp. 376-377 |
