PhD completions during pandemic…

A PhD completion is an amazing achievement, even more so during lockdown in a pandemic. These PhD candidates, completing across 2021, are to be congratulated on their amazing determination, commitment and research capacity.

Zozie Brown: Malfunctioning Bots: Posthuman Identities in Young Adult Literature

Zozie now works as a lecturer and production coordinator in the film industry. Her PhD combines both creative and critical work with a focus on posthumanism in young adult fiction and children’s literature. She also holds a Master of Arts in Literature (First Class) and a Bachelor of Arts in Animation and Interactive Media, and has worked as an illustrator and commercial 3D animator since 2014. In her spare time, Zozie loves anything circus related and can be found hanging upside down at her local circus school (or outdoors!).

Ellie Gardner: ‘“The quintessence of difficult”: Examining the Disruptive Literary Antiheroine’

Ellie Gardner’s research focuses on the representation of the antiheroine in modern Gothic and crime-thriller texts. With a focus on feminist, abject, and gender theory, Ellie’s thesis examines the antiheroine’s relationship to motherhood, violence, and power.

Publications: “To start: I should never have been born”: The Antiheroine as Stranger in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Gone Girl’, Papers on Language and Literature, forthcoming late 2021.

‘The Fearful Transience of Identity: Analyzing the Gothic Antiheroine in Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs and Lauren Acampora’s The Paper Wasp’, Critique, June 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1779022

Samantha Stephens: From Conflict to Kinship: Renegotiating Age in Youth Fantasy Fiction

Sam Stephens has research interests which include fictional representations of age and intergenerationality across the spectrum. Drawing on age studies and children’s literary theory, Sam’s thesis investigated the literary and fantastic strategies that a selection of children’s and YA fantasy novels have deployed to challenge limiting discourses of age and to foreground the diversity with which age, ageing, and intergenerational relationships can be experienced. 

Publication: Stephens, S and Rutherford, L 2021, ‘Storytelling as Intergenerational Connection: Challenging Ageism through Metafiction in Recent Writing for Young People’, Bookbird, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 58-68, doi: 10.1353/bkb.2021.0045