Skip to main content
Emma Mary Kirby

Emma Mary Kirby

(she/her)

Research student

School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Email
KirbyE4@cardiff.ac.uk

Overview

I started my Full-time PhD in Critical and Creative Writing in January 2023. Prior to this, I received a First-Class Honours Degree from Oxford Brookes Univeristy, an MA in Creative Writing from Portsmouth University and an MA in Nineteenth Century Literature from King's College London (Distinction). 

I am currently writing a neo-Victorian ghost story, under the supervision of Professor Ann Heilmann and Dr Meredith Miller. My aim is to employ a Gothic framework to draw upon neo-Victorian fiction's engagement with contemporary concerns, specifically in relation to Britain's colonial past. 

I attended the BAVS 2023 conference and will be giving a paper at the Cardiff Hub in 2024. I delivered a paper to the ENCAPsulate Conference in 2023 on 'Colonial Huantings in Sarah Water' The Little Stranger. 

Prior to starting my PhD, I published numerous educational resources and articles for A Level and GCSE Literature. 

 

 

Research

Thesis

Little Shadows

I am interested in how our textual constructedness is marked by the stories/histories we consume, how we interpret them, who we choose to tell and how we do this. I am experimenting with the plurality of people's responses to past traumas and am researching the role that personal and communal interpretation plays when the past is re-examined. By doing so, I aim to make an original contribution to the neo-Victorian and ghost-story genres by repurposing the English Country House narrative for the post-colonial reader, in a way that serves to problemetise race and empire.  

Supervisors

Ann Heilmann

Ann Heilmann

Professor

Meredith Miller

Meredith Miller

Lecturer