Responsibilities

Teaching

20^th century and contemporary prose and poetry, especially by women; modern and contemporary poetry; feminist thought; creative writing (prose and poetry).

Background

My first degree was in English (St John’s College, Oxford) and then I studied for an interdisciplinary MA in Women’s Studies at the University of York. I wrote my Ph.D. on contemporary women poets, and did my first teaching for Leeds University Adult Education department. In 1991 I moved south for my first full-time lecturing post at Oxford Brookes University, and stayed for ten happy years. I co-organised the conferences/festivals Kicking Daffodils: women and poetry (1994, 1997) and co-founded the Modern and Contemporary Poetry Colloquium. As these initiatives suggest, I have always enjoyed exploring the relationship between critical and creative practices, and bringing writers and critics together. By this stage, I was becoming interested in teaching creative writing so, in 2000 I moved to Nottingham Trent University to join the group teaching the MA and undergraduate programmes. I started writing a novel alongside my academic research. Now that I’m at MMU, I’m planning to continue to develop both my critical and creative writing and teaching.

Research

My research interests are closely related to my teaching profile (see above). Gendering Poetry: contemporary women and men poets (Rivers Oram, 2005) is a book about the part gender plays in reading and writing poetry. I have supervised PhDs on young adult fiction, Caribbean women poets, and the history of Sheba feminist press, amongst others.

Other Information

I am a member of the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Review.

Publications

(see www.eri.mmu.ac.uk for further details)

Gendering Poetry: contemporary women and men poets (Rivers Oram Pandora, 2005)

Kicking Daffodils: essays on twentieth-century women poets, (Edinburgh University Press, 1996)

Words on film: collaborative work between poets and film-makers, chapter in Contemporary Poetry, Culture and Value, edited by Andrew Roberts and Jonathan Allison, 2002, Edinburgh University Press.

Theorising the personal: using autobiography in academic writing, chapter in Contemporary Feminist Theories, edited by Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones (Edinburgh University Press, 1998).