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Anna Girling

DR

Personal profile

Biography

I joined Edinburgh as an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Twentieth-Century English and American Literature in 2023 and have previously taught at Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, and York University in Toronto.

I completed my PhD at Edinburgh (on Edith Wharton, gay male literature, and literary decadence) in 2022. I also have an MA in English and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in English Literature from York University in Toronto.

In 2022-2023 I was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Brighton. I am currently an Affiliate at Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and am a Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Edith Wharton Society (https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com). I have previously also held an Eccles Centre Fellowship at the British Library.

My work to date has centred on the literary representation and theorisation of community, and the relationship between politics, gender, and literary form, in writing from across the twentieth century. My wider research and teaching interests include: literary decadence, aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism; anti-colonial literature and postcolonialism; women’s writing; middlebrow literature and crime writing; book and publishing history; periodical studies; gender, sexuality, camp, and queer studies; and many other aspects of twentieth-century prose writing from and about the UK, Europe, US, and Caribbean.

My PhD thesis, 'Edith Wharton and queer history at the fin de siècle', which I am currently revising for publication, places the American writer Edith Wharton in the context of European decadent literature, in particular a gay male literary tradition, and of the particular moment in the history of sexuality at which she was writing. I approach Wharton as a modernist scholar as well as an Americanist, and have used recent work in queer theory, decadent, and modernist studies, and cosmopolitanism – in conjunction with a rigorous historical contextualisation of her work – to reassess her career.

My current research includes work on the writer, publisher, editor, and activist, Nancy Cunard, and in particular her anti-colonial and anti-fascist writings from the 1930s.

Keywords

  • PR English literature
  • PS American literature

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