York St John University

Faculty Member, Faculty of Arts

Senior Lecturer, Literature Studies and Creative Writing

About

I took my first degree in English Literature at Balliol College Oxford, an M.Ed. in Discourse Analysis at the University of Liverpool  and a Ph.D. in English and Related Studies at the University of York. I was one of the first women to graduate from Balliol in 1982, and have taught at the Universities of York, Liverpool and the Open University before coming to York St John in 2004.

My research and teaching are inspired by the mediations of word and image, art and literature, and by eighteenth-century textual, social and cultural histories. I am particularly interested in research- and enquiry-based learning, in which students take increasingly autonomous control over their own projects and learning processes.

My PhD took the form of a critical edition of selected letters of the first-generation Bluestocking, Mary Delany, artist, botanist, social commentator and virtuosa letter-writer in the eighteenth-century polite style, who was also friend of Jonathan Swift, patron of G.F. Handel and an early female political activist. My critical edition of selected early letters has been accepted for publication by the Oxford Text Archive and I am working on a full digital edition of the Letters.

This year, I have been working with artist Nicola Lee, excerpting the Delany texts and works by Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot to make a 'found poem' and artists' book, 'Dark as a Pocket', (see Papers section). This work was commissioned by Dundee University for the AHRC research project, Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition, which aims to map readers' cognitive responses to ambiguous graphic-textual objects.

'Dark as a Pocket' is on show at the Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts until the end of March 2011, then at The Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh from May to July and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh in the Autumn.

www.poetrybeyondtext.org


I have also been responsible for a digital installation project, which shows a fusion of poetry and student art in notable locations in and beyond the City of York, e.g. York Minster, York Art Gallery, the City Screen cinema, Helmslely Castle, Rievaulx Abbey and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I am currently reconceptualising an interdisciplinary, performance and process-based research project, Imagining Eighteenth-Century York, which aims to reconfigure York in the public imagination as an eighteenth-century city, as well as/rather than a Roman, mediaeval, Viking and modern urban space.

I collaborate with Dr. Hisashi Nakamura, YSJU Japan Projects Officer, to promote the understanding and writing of Tanka (Japanese short-form poetry) in English, both nationally and internationally.

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