Charlotte Makepeace

Profile

I first joined the School of English at the University of Leeds in 2013 when I undertook a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. I graduated with a First-Class Honours degree in 2016.

Following this, I studied English Literature at master’s level at the University of Leeds, having been awarded the John Barnard scholarship. I graduated in July 2019 with a merit.

I returned to the School of English as a PhD student in October 2019, working on blindness and the senses in modernist literature. My doctoral research is fully funded by the Inga-Stina Ewbank scholarship. 

Research interests

• Modernist fiction
• Blindness and the senses
• Disability studies
• Sensory reading (braille, audiobooks etc.)
• Sexuality and censorship in Victorian and modernist fiction.

My research examines blindness and the senses in modernist fiction. Authors whose work I analyse include D.H. Lawrence, Henry Green, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. I focus on how these authors conceptualise blindness and seek to deprivilege the visual by utilising the other senses, particularly touch and hearing, as alternate ways to knowledge. As well as these literary representations of blindness and the senses, I am interested in ideas of sensory reading. As a blind person I use touch (braille) and sound (audiobooks) to access literature and would like to explore how my sensory reading experience factors into notions of the deprivileging of sight and alternate ways to knowledge.  

Qualifications

• MA in English Literature (University of Leeds - 2019).
• BA Hons in English Literature (University of Leeds - 2016).