Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Hannah Spruce
Part-time Lecturer
Hannah Spruce teaches on the English Literature and Creative Writing programmes at Leeds Beckett University. Her research focuses on twenty-first-century women's writing, particularly from Canada and the United States, and book club participation.
In the field of contemporary women's writing, Hannah writes on a diverse range of genres from autofiction, poetry, and crime genres to speculative fiction and witness writing. Her work weaves together discussions of sexual violence, disability, racial formation, gender, Indigeneity, and settler-colonialism.
Hannah has published work on the procedural sitcom (McFarland, 2023), writing about sexual violence through humour (Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2022), and the late poetry of Seamus Heaney (Estudios Irlandeses, 2016). She has forthcoming work on sexual and lateral violence in Métis and Chicana writing in the Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (2024). She is currently writing her first book on women’s writing and the “psychopathic”. The monograph highlights women’s textual innovations in portrayals of serial murder, sexual violence, and the violence of settler-colonisation and racial formations in the US and Canada.
Research Interests
Hannah is interested in feminist transformations and adaptations of literary modes; Indigenous literature and settler colonialism; the intersections of science discourses and literary texts; critical race theory; feminist literary representations of violence and offenders, and representations of neurodiversity in literature.
Since January 2019, Hannah has run a public nonfiction book club that explores topics such as disability rights, feminisms, and racial politics. Her current research emerges from her work in this area. She is interested in the meaningfulness of book club participation looking at the contemporary reading group as a site of disclosure, critical thinking, and identity production and exploration.
Ask Me About
- Book clubs
- Feminism
- Literature
- Race
