Dr Meredith Miller

Publication

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Research

My pre-occupation with the material context of fiction in perdiocals continues with in my current work on aesthetics, generic divides and abortion in 1920s Britain. I am the lead for the UK-wide research network Culture and the Reproductive Body, working with colleagues from eleven institutions around the country. We have recently completed an AHRC networking proposal and will be organising a symposium entitled Twentieth Century Culture and the Reproductive Body at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in early December 2023.

I am currently working on two projects which began from a single sheet of regional newspaper from 1923. An advertisement for abortifacient implements and remedies found there has led to both a critical monograph and a novel. The critical monograph, Abortion and Aesthetics in 1920s Britain,  follows on from Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction (Palgrave, 2013) in a further exploration of the manner in which literature enacts its generic distinctions against the bodily experience of semi-distant female subjects. The novel, currently titled Rock Paper Sister, is set in 1920s Edgbaston and centres on three cousins who have inherited family wealth generated from a business which manufactures and distributes abortifacient remedies and surgical implements. 

Biography

I was born and raised in the United States, where I completed my first two degrees. My Bachelor’s, from the University of New Orleans, was a modular degree focussed on World Literature and Women’s Studies.  The interdisciplinary approach of the Women’s Studies programme at UNO introduced me to critical and methodological approaches from a broad range of Humanities and Social Science disciplines which continue to inform my academic work.  The passionate and socially active scholars who taught me there are a continued source of inspiration.

I completed a Master’s in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York in 1996. My MA pathway concentrated on Medieval Literature and Critical Theory, in particular theories of gender, sexuality and identity.  Following the MA, I came to the UK to undertake my PhD at University of Sussex.  The PhD focussed on the relation between subculture and mass culture in lesbian reading communities formed around pulp fiction in the postwar United States.  Some articles derived from that work can be seen here and here.

My PhD work made it clear to me that my preferred methodology for thinking about literature would always include the material and social context within which it was produced and received. My work continues to focus on the novel as a machine for harnessing gendered desires, on the role of women, gender and sexuality in the development of the novel and on the way in which queer communities have deployed its generic forms.

Though I have always been an imaginative as well as an academic writer, my creative work and my teaching have coincided only since 2014, when I began increasingly to teach and supervise Creative Writing. My novels and short fiction are informed by the same concerns as my academic work, and I am particularly interested in addressing feminine readerships.  The experience of publishing big market novels has added new layers to my understanding of the context in which novels are made and how reading communities are formed around particular markets and genres.  You can read the first three chapters of my novel Little Wrecks here.

Supervisions

I am interested in supervising PhD students in:

• gender and fictions of the long nineteenth-century
• theories of gender and sexuality, particularly as they relate to narrative form
• the fin de siecle and the advent of modernism
• creative writing: fiction
• questions around the literary and the popular

Current supervision

Hari Berrow

Research student