Personal statement
My primary areas of research interest are neo-Edwardian and Edwardian literature and culture, the writing of lives, and relationships between architecture and the humanities.
I currently hold the position of Associate Dean (Postgraduate Research) and Director of the Graduate School in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. I am also the university-wide lead for AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) PGR operations, and I represent the university on the Executive Commitee of the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Scotland and the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.
Teaching
On the BA English degree, I teach the third-year core class on Victorian Literature and two Honours options: ‘Victorian Gothic’ and ‘Present-Day Victorians: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Film’. I also contribute a lecture on Italian-Glaswegian cultures to the second-year interdisciplinary class, ‘Glasgow: History, Culture and Identity’. I have previously taught classes on literary theory, Edwardian and later twentieth-century literature and life writing.
I was Subject Leader for English Studies from 2010-13.
I have been nominated for five Teaching Excellence Awards by Strathclyde Students’ Union.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
On the MLitt in Literature, Culture and Place, I teach ‘Visions of Suburbia: Interdisciplinary Representations: 1850 – present’. I also co-organise the postgraduate research methods class.
Research supervision: I would welcome enquiries from potential research students wishing to work in any of the areas listed under ‘research interests’.
I have recently supervised or externally examined theses on the literary architecture of Edwardian suburbia; myth and life writing in the fiction of Marina Warner; H. G. Wells and the novel. I have acted as second supervisor or internal examiner on various projects including work, class and gender in Canadian fiction, 1890s-1920s and the single woman in women’s fiction, 1920s-1940s.
I was previously Postgraduate Research Director for English, Journalism and Creative Writing, and, from 2013-15, I sat on the Languages and Literatures panel of the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Scotland.
Current research students
Miles Beard - 'The Fiction of Anita Brookner: Reception, Persona and Literary Value', co-supervised with Prof Faye Hammill. 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’, co-supervised with Prof Erica Fudge. Funded by an AHRC studentship.
David Rush - ‘Glamour, Politics and Personality in the Mid-Century Middlebrow: the fiction of Nancy Mitford’, co-supervised with Prof Faye Hammill. Funded by a faculty studentship.
Roseannah Murphy - ‘The Literary Landscapes of Post-Industrial Glasgow: deindustrialisation, cultural policy and the postindustrial novel’, co-supervised with Dr Eleanor Bell. Funded by an AHRC studentship.
Research interests
My main areas of research interest are neo-Edwardian and Edwardian literature and culture, life writing, and the architectural humanities, from the later nineteenth century until the present. I am primarily a literary critic, but also draw on approaches from cultural history, cultural studies and women’s studies. Within, and between, these research areas, I have worked on topics such as neo-Victorianism, nostalgia and memory studies, literary adaptation to film and television, Italo-Glaswegian cultures, and Victorian spiritualism and automatic writing.
At Strathclyde, I am a member of the Literature, Culture and Place research centre.
Current research: I am currently writing a monograph on neo-Edwardianism, and commencing a new project on the life and work of Dorothy M. Meads (supported by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant).
I am editing a journal special issue on space and place in Italo-Glaswegian life narratives. I'm also an advisory editor to the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to Architecture and Literature, and am contributing an essay on the cultural history of the Italian Centre, Glasgow.
Previous projects include Architexture: Textual and Architectural Spaces, a major international conference partly funded by the British Academy, which led to the book Writing the Modern City. I was also the leader of an ESRC seminar series, Nostalgia in the Twenty-First Century, and co-editor of a special issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture on the series theme.
Professional activities: member of the AHRC Peer Review College; AHRC panellist; Carnegie Research Assessor; I have also reviewed for the ESRC, the Wellcome Trust, and many scholarly journals and publishers, including Oxford University Press, Routledge, Longman, Life Writing, Modern Language Review, Modernism/Modernity.
I am a core member of the AHRC Middlebrow Cultures Network, the Edwardian Culture Network, Architectural Humanities Research Association, British Association of Victorian Studies and Scottish Network of Modernist Studies. I have held visiting research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
Professional activities
- From Brontë to Bloomsbury Fourth International Conference: Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1900s and 1910s
- Participant
- 11/7/2017
- London’s women historians: a celebration and a conversation
- Participant
- 13/3/2017
- AHRC Peer Review College (External organisation)
- Member
- 12/2016
- The Digital Human: Humanities and Social Sciences in the Digital Age
- Organiser
- 12/9/2016
- Women’s History Scotland conference
- Participant
- 9/9/2016
- AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) (External organisation)
- Member
- 27/10/2015
more professional activities
Projects
- AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Scotland
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator) Fudge, Erica (Principal Investigator) Logan, Louise (Post Grad Student)
- PhD studentship - 3 years - 2015-18
- Period 01-Oct-2015 - 30-Sep-2018
- Competition Doctoral 2010 Grant | Murphy, Roseannah
- Bell, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) Edwards, Sarah (Co-investigator) Murphy, Roseannah (Research Co-investigator)
- Period 01-Oct-2010 - 01-Nov-2016
- Diarist, Grocers and Teachers.The Many Lives of Dorothy Meads: Writing Early Twentieth-Century Women's Histories
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator)
- Period 30-Jun-2015 - 31-Dec-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
- Period 19-Nov-2012 - 30-Jun-2013
- Workshop on 'Nostalgia'
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator) Hammill, Faye (Co-investigator) Hamilton, Kathleen (Co-investigator) Wilson, Juliette (Co-investigator) Wagner, Beverly (Co-investigator)
- A one-day event with internal and external speakers, funded by Bridging the Gap (£1200).
- Period 08-Jun-2008 - 08-Jun-2008
- British Academy conference grant
- Edwards, Sarah (Principal Investigator)
- An award made in November 2007 to support the conference, 'Architexture: Textual and Architectural Spaces', jointly organised by the English and Architecture departments, University of Strathclyde, April 2008. (£2000)
- Period 15-Apr-2008 - 17-Apr-2008
more projects
Address
English
Lord Hope Building
Lord Hope Building
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