Shauna Walker

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in 2020 as a Postgraduate Researcher in the School of English. My doctoral research is fully funded by the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities consortium. 

Research interests

• early twentieth-century literature
• medical humanities 
• nationhood and empire
• rural studies
• environmental humanities

My research project explores the intersections between national identity and environmental health in British interwar literature (1919–1939). I propose that literary representations of health can provide an important framework for navigating the complexities of national identity and national landscapes in this period. The questions my research fundamentally addresses include: which types of national environments are constituted as healthy or unhealthy and which types of bodies supposedly belong to certain environments? By exploring why certain bodies and their environments are constituted as (un)healthy, we can begin to recognise who and what are included/excluded from the nation and how environmental health was being used as a language for engaging with the tensions and contradictions generated by technological modernity, imperialism and industrial decline in this period. My research covers a range of literature including middlebrow novels, travel writing, rural women’s writing and working-class novels. 

Awards

• Anthony Burgess Prize from the University of Manchester (2018)
• Highly Commended by the Global Undergraduate Awards (2018)
• The Manchester Alumni Scholarship Scheme (2018–2019)
• AHRC Doctoral Studentship from the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities consortium

Publications

• ‘Gothic Modernisms: Modernity and the Postcolonial Gothic in Tayeb Salih’s ‘Season of Migration to the North’’, Gothic Studies, 22 (2020), 285–299. 

Conference Papers

• ‘‘Something More than his Arm Had Been Left Behind in France’: Disability and the English Countryside in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding’, at The Centre for Disability Studies Postgraduate Conference, University of Leeds, (July 2020)
• Co-Organiser of the Medical (Post)Humanities?: Reassessing and ReImagining the Human Conference, The Mowbray, April 2022.

• Co-Chair for ‘​​​​​​In Conversation with Dr Vanessa Ashall and Jamie. B Smith: A Critical ‘Medical Posthumanities’ in Practice, at Critical: NNMHR Congress 2023

Teaching

• Foundations of English Studies (2021)
• Modern Fictions in English (2022)

Qualifications

• BA English Literature (University of Manchester)
• MA Modern and Contemporary Literature (University of Manchester)