Dr Elizabeth English

Overview

I joined Cardiff Metropolitan University in 2014, having previously worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway and Goldsmiths, University of London. I completed my BA in English Literature, MA in Modernism and Modern Writers, and Phd in English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. My postgraduate degrees were undertaken with the aid of AHRB and AHRC funding. My doctoral research was completed in 2011 and focussed on the relationship between popular cultural forms and lesbian literature in relation to British literary censorship in the early twentieth-century. My first monograph, Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction, builds on this research and is an interdisciplinary investigation into the effects of governmental censorship on literary production, drawing on cultural and social history, medical humanities, and gender and queer studies.

At the heart of my research is the desire to celebrate the history of women’s writing and its relevance for us today. My research focuses primarily on women’s writing from the twentieth century and the use of literature to navigate the complex political and social conditions of gender. It draws on a range of other disciplines to do this, including medical humanities, social and cultural history, and gender and queer studies. I have published numerous essays and articles on twentieth and twenty-first century culture and literature, including subjects such as women’s education and crime fiction, queer time travel, sexology in utopian fiction, and women’s queer historical biographies. I am currently working on an edited collection titled Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres, which is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. This edited volume presents thirteen newly commissioned chapters that reassess and interrogate the meanings, uses and limitations of lesbian modernism by exploring a broad range of authors, genres and histories. I am the Joint Chair for the Modernist Network Cymru (https://modernistnetworkcymru.org); I sit on the editorial boards for the Journal of Historical Fictions and the Goldsmiths Press science fiction imprint, Gold SF; and I have served as a reviewer for Pennsylvania State University Press, the University of Florida Press, the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, and the Journal of Homosexuality. I have organised several international interdisciplinary conferences and public engagement events.

I welcome expressions of interest for PhD research in the above areas.

For more information, follow me on Twitter @E_C_English or on Academia.edu.

Research Publications

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