Personal statement
BA (London) MA, PhD (York)
I am Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Humanities, with research and teaching interests in neo-Edwardian and Edwardian literature and culture, life writing, women's writing and architectural humanities.
My major publications include Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity (Routledge, 2011, with Jonathan Charley), Nostalgia in the Twenty-First Century (special issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2014, with Kathy Hamilton, Faye Hammill, Juliette Wilson and Beverly Wagner) and recent articles in Women's Writing, Women's History Review and The Routledge Research Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City. My research has been funded by the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy, Carnegie Trust and Leverhulme Trust.
In the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, I have served as Vice-Dean Postgraduate (2018-19) and Associate Dean and Head of the Graduate School (2015-17). From 2015-20, I represented the University on the Executive Commitee of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.
Teaching
Undergraduate teaching
- Writing Through Time 2 (year 2 core class co-ordinator)
- La Belle Epoque: Edwardian and First World War Literature, 1900-20 (year 3 option)
- Present-Day Victorians: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Film (year 4 option)
I have been nominated for five Teaching Excellence Awards by Strathclyde Students’ Union.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Postgraduate teaching
- Visions of Suburbia: Interdisciplinary Representations, 1850 - present (MLitt Interdisciplinary English Studies).
- Research Skills and Methods in Humanities.
Postgraduate research supervision
I would welcome enquiries from potential research students wishing to work in any of the areas listed under ‘research interests’. Below is an indicative list of current and previous supervisions.
Federica Giardino - 'The Legacy of the Water: a comparative study of the literary identity of the cities of Glasgow and Genoa'. Funded by an AHRC DTP studentship, in collaboration with Glasgow School of Art.
Miles Beard - 'The Fiction of Anita Brookner: Reception, Persona and Literary Value'. Funded by a Strathclyde Student Excellence Award.
Louise Logan - 'Beastly Encounters: human-animal relations in The Illustrated Police News and late Victorian and Edwardian culture’. Funded by an AHRC DTP studentship.
Innes McGarry - 'The Fiction of M. R. James'. Funded by an MRes Interdisciplinary Excellence Award.
Craig McLean - 'The Literary Architecture of Edwardian Suburbia'. Funded by a faculty studentship.
Roseannah Murphy - ‘The Literary Landscapes of Post-Industrial Glasgow: deindustrialisation, cultural policy and the postindustrial novel’. Funded by an AHRC studentship.
David Rush - ‘Glamour, Politics and Personality in the Mid-Century Middlebrow: the fiction of Nancy Mitford’. Funded by a faculty studentship.
Souhir Zekri - 'Myth and Life Writing in the Fiction of Marina Warner'. Funded by a British Council studentship.
Research interests
Research Interests
I am a literary critic and cultural historian. My principal areas of research interest are neo-Edwardian and Edwardian literature and culture, life writing, women's writing and the architectural humanities, from the later nineteenth century until the present.
Within, and between, these areas, I have worked on topics including women's diaries; neo-Victorianism; literary adaptation to film and television; Italian-Glaswegian cultures; Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism; a British Academy-funded conference, Architexture: Textual and Architectural Spaces, with the Department of Architecture, which led to the book Writing the Modern City; an ESRC seminar series, Nostalgia in the 21st Century, with the Department of Marketing, which led to a special journal issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture.
Current Research
I am currently working on three projects:
- a monograph on neo-Edwardianism
- a biographical project on the life and work of historian and educationalist Dorothy M. Meads (nee Gladish), which has been supported by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant. I am also working with Andrew Chandler (University of Chichester) on a related book about women and British Christianity, 1880-1960.
- I am an investigator on a Leverhulme-funded project about libraries as transformative spaces, in collaboration with Kathy Hamilton, Juliette Wilson and Holly Porteous (Department of Marketing) and Glasgow Women's Library.
External reviewing
I have acted as an invited reviewer and panel member for many scholarly journals, publishers and funding bodies (see 'Professional Activities'). In 2020, I was commended for my outstanding contribution to the AHRC Peer Review College.
Professional activities
- Cardiff University Press (Publisher)
- Peer reviewer
- 2020
- Twentieth Century Literature (Journal)
- Peer reviewer
- 2020
- AHRC panel member for 'Changing Landscapes' call (Event)
- Peer reviewer
- 5/12/2019
- AHRC panel member for 'Changing Landscapes' call (Event)
- Peer reviewer
- 11/9/2019
- Victorian Review (Journal)
- Peer reviewer
- 9/9/2019
- External reviewer, Structured Doctorate programme approval, Schools of Humanities and Education, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland (Event)
- Peer reviewer
- 24/5/2019
More professional activities
Projects
- AHRC DTP studentship, co-supervisor with Glasgow School of Art
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2020 - 30-Jan-2022
- Transformative Servicescapes and consumer vulnerability
- Hamilton, Kathy (Principal Investigator) Edwards, Sarah (Co-investigator) Wilson, Juliette (Co-investigator) Porteous, Holly (Researcher)
- 01-Jan-2020 - 31-Jan-2022
- AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Scotland
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator) Fudge, Erica (Principal Investigator) Logan, Louise (Post Grad Student)
- PhD studentship - 3 years - 2015-18
- 01-Jan-2015 - 30-Jan-2018
- Diarist, Grocers and Teachers.The Many Lives of Dorothy Meads: Writing Early Twentieth-Century Women's Histories
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator)
- 30-Jan-2015 - 31-Jan-2015
- City of Facades
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator) Wilson, Juliette (Principal Investigator) Charley, Jonathan (Principal Investigator)
- One-day workshop on pilot project to be held in 2013 on Glasgow and urban nostalgia with colleagues from Architecture and Marketing
- 19-Jan-2012 - 30-Jan-2013
- Glasgow school days remembered
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator) Hamilton, Kathy (Co-investigator) Hammill, Faye (Co-investigator) Wagner, Beverly (Co-investigator) Wilson, Juliette (Co-investigator)
- 29-Jan-2011 - 05-Jan-2011
More projects