University of Edinburgh

Graduate Student, English Literature

About

Originally from Canada, I received my B.A. Hons from St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. I obtained an M.Litt in Women, Writing, and Gender from the University of St Andrews in 2008, and began my doctoral studies at Edinburgh that same year.

I was both the co-editor for Forum: the Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts (Issues 9 and 10) and the second-year PhD representative on the Student/Staff Liaison Committee in 2009-2010, and in the summer of 2010 I began working with the University of Edinburgh’s Kickstart Organisation. For Kickstart I helped to organise and deliver workshops for pupils interested in the university’s English Literature programme, which I will be again undertaking this summer. Since June 2010 I have also worked to launch and maintain the department’s online PhD profiles.

My thesis research focuses on the representation and role of the child-figure in late nineteenth century fiction; it currently seems to be exploring the way in which the child is bound up with ideas of an aesthetic ideal and the nature of the aesthetic child-figure’s relationship to language. I'm exploring what I hope is some sort of progression of this idea through the works of Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James.

In addition, I'm very interested in the representation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical “monsters” and sideshow “freaks”, exploring the labels “monster”, “freak”, and “disabled” and their unique engagement with the act of looking, and more specifically intrigued by the relationship between “monsters” and the medical gaze. I'm also more broadly interested in nineteenth-century women writers, the grotesque or monstrous body, feminist and gender theory, the nature of language in late-nineteenth century aesthetic literature, and spaces in literature.

Outside of academia, I enjoy baking and knitting (particularly hats).

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