Shauna Walker

Profile

In 2018 I graduated from the University of Manchester with a First Class Honours Degree in English Literature and in 2019 I graduated from my Masters with a Distinction in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I joined the University of Leeds in 2020 as a Postgraduate Researcher in the School of English, working on representations of health and the body in interwar literature (1919-1939). 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 
• Biopolitics
• Marxist and Feminist Theory

My PhD thesis explores whether reigning mythologies of the interwar period are necessarily undermined by research into the relationship between medical science and literature. I am especially interested in the ways that vocabularies of health, disease and biology shaped both political ideology and literary form in the interwar years, including genres such as reportage writing, documentaries, satire and working-class fiction. In the wake of the Great War and on the cusp of another war, the cultivation of health often fed into public debates on the health of the nation as well as anxieties concerning the health and longevity of ‘European civilisation’ as writers became embroiled in debates such as national fitness, welfare funding, birth control and social housing. By using a medical humanities framework, my research is ultimately a study of health and illness’s political and aesthetic role in the context of British interwar culture.

Awards

• Anthony Burgess Prize (2018) from the University of Manchester
• 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

Qualifications

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