Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
In this talk, Susan Watkins explores how we might challenge these narratives and replace them with ideas about ageing as adaptation. Making use of ideas about adaptation from cultural studies and humanities, the talk will focus on science fiction and fantasy fiction as rich sources for creative alternatives to apocalyptic visions of ageing futures.
Leeds Cultural Conversations is a series of public lectures organised by the Centre for Culture and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. The series is run in partnership with Leeds Central Library and each event showcases a different piece of leading research being undertaken by our academic colleagues to a wider public audience, with discussion and debate encouraged by all that attend.
Susan Watkins is Professor of Women's Writing in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is an expert in contemporary women's writing and feminist theory, with particular research interests in dystopia, apocalyptic fiction, ageing and the future.
Susan's most recent book is about contemporary women’s post-apocalyptic writing. As well as her interests in Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and contemporary women's dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, Susan is currently working on research projects on ageing and the future and ageing and the cultural industries. She welcomes proposals from prospective PhD students in these areas and in the broader field of women's fiction and feminist theory.
Susan is a founder member and former Chair of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and previously a Co-Editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She was Director of the university's Centre for Culture and the Arts for 10 years.Susan's main teaching at undergraduate level includes modules on Twentieth-Century Literature: Alienation and Dystopia (level 5) and Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (level 6). At MA level she teaches the modules Literature in Practice and Contemporary Apocalyptic Fictions.
