Dr Georgia Walton

My research interests are broadly in US American literature and culture with an emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. However, I seek to make connections across different historical moments and forms. I am particularly interested in the relationships between philosophy and literature, and film and literature. My doctoral thesis, ‘Nineteenth-Century Legacies in the Work of Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Marilynne Robinson, and George Saunders’, examined the afterlives of various canonical figures of the nineteenth-century US in twenty-first-century literature. Focussing on works of fiction, memoir, and poetry by these four prominent US authors the thesis argued that contemporary writers turn to the earlier period in order to harness its idealistic conception of the literary as a mode that facilitates intersubjective communication and thus shapes social life.

I am currently working on a monograph that develops my PhD research as well as a project that investigates the significance of theme parks and fairgrounds in Modern and postmodern narrative forms.

I have contributed to and led various projects in collaboration with external partners and cultural institutions in order to communicate my research to a wider audience. In April 2018 I devised and ran a workshop on collaged memoir writing that was based on my research on Maggie Nelson’s autotheory. This workshop was part of a programme of events organised to complement the exhibition, The House That Heals the Soul, at The Tetley Art Gallery. In November 2019 I undertook my Researcher Employability Project (REP) at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) where I researched the relationship between eco-feminism and non-reproductive futurism. This led to a resource aimed at helping both library staff and users to navigate critical questions related to motherhood, environment and futurity. From January 2023 I will serve as a board member for The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.

I have taught a range of undergraduate modules in the School of English here at Leeds as well as courses for the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of York. I am an Associate Fellow of the HEA.

I am Associate Editor at parallax, a journal of cultural and critical theory based in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

Journal Articles

‘“It was only the darkened house that could contain her”: Containing Forms in The Scarlet Letter’, Irish Journal of American Studies, 12 (2023).

‘Language in the Garden: Transcendentalist Legacies and the Problem of Metaphor in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels’ English Studies, 102:4 (2021), 431-452.

‘George Eliot’s Enchanted Real’, The George Eliot Review, 50 (2021).

‘Emersonian Language in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, WRoCAH Journal 4 (2018).

Reviews

‘Elaine Auyoung, When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind’, The George Eliot Review, 51 (2022), 122-125.

Bedini D, et al ‘A Year in Conferences 2020’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 67.1 (2021), 279-348.

‘Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of the Mind (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2019, £75.00)’, Journal of American Studies, 55:1 (2021), 210-211.

‘Review of The Quiet Contemporary American Novel by Rachel Sykes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017’, US Studies Online (2018).

Editor-reviewed and Online Publications

‘If you liked this: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’, English Review 32:1 (2022)

‘Emersonian Sentimentalism and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo’, The Transparent Eyeball: Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Blog (November 2021)

‘Motherhood, Science, Futurity’, GWL Blog (April 2020)

Awards and Funding

· Honourable Mention BAAS Postgraduate Essay Prize 2021.

· Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Graduate Student Conference Paper Award 2021.

· George Eliot Fellowship Essay Prize 2021.

· WRoCAH Researcher Employability Project Award for ‘Motherhood, Science, Futurity,’ Glasgow Women’s Library.

· WRoCAH Large Award to attend the Twelfth International Whitman Week Seminar and Symposium, NYU, June 2019.

· AHRC WRoCAH Doctoral Studentship, University of Leeds, 2017-2021.

Qualifications

· PhD in English Literature, University of Leeds, 2022

· MLitt Victorian Literature, University of Glasgow, 2017

· BA (hons) English Language and Literature, University of Leeds, 2014