Shauna Walker

My PhD thesis examined the intersections between health, environment and nationhood in the British literature of the 1920s and 1930s. It engaged with authors primarily associated with popular middlebrow and regional writing in order to offer a fresh perspective on interwar literature which departs from the well-established canons of high modernism and Auden Generation poetry. The authors I researched included six interwar authors (Winifred Holtby, A.J. Cronin, H.V. Morton, J.B. Priestley, Margiad Evans and Mary Webb) and drew upon the materialist history of interwar archives, essays and popular culture. In doing so, my thesis re-evaluated popular notions of the ‘interwar’ by rethinking how nationhood and modernity were understood and imagined during a period of changing health systems, new ideas about the outdoors, and early signs of British imperial decline.

My current research focusses on global women's farm fiction in the 20th century and will build on some of the material from my doctoral thesis which explored rural women's fiction in 1920s and 1930s Britain. I am developing some of the key issues identified in my thesis regarding the ecological themes identified in rural women's writing as well as the marginalisation of women's farm fiction from literary scholarship and from histories of modern feminism.

Publications

Journal articles

Shauna Walker, ‘Heredity. Funny Thing That’: Disability and the Nation-State in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding’, Modernism/Modernity (Work in Progress).

Shauna Walker, ‘Absent Futures: Childhood Spectres and Irish Nationhood in Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood’, Irish University Review (Forthcoming in 2025).

Shauna Walker et al, ‘Medical Posthumanities: Reassessing and Reimagining the Human’, Special Issue, Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2023).

Shauna Walker, Mary Dawson, Rosie Crocker and Eva Surawy Stepney, ‘Introduction: Medical Posthumanities: Reassessing and Reimagining the Human’, Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2023).

Shauna Walker, Rosalind Crocker, Mary Dawson, Jamie B Smith, Eva Surawy Stepney and Eva Willis, ‘A Posthuman Perspective on Nursing: In Conversation with Jamie Smith and Eva Willis’, Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2023).

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

Conferences and Presentations

2023

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

2022

Co-Organiser of the Medical (Post)Humanities?: Reassessing and ReImagining the Human Conference, The Mowbray, April 2022.

2020

‘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).

Teaching

Literary theory and criticism,

Modern and contemporary literature

Qualifications

PhD, English Literature – University of Leeds

MA, Modern and Contemporary Literature – University of Manchester

BA, English Literature, University of Manchester