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Professor Susan Watkins

Professor

Susan Watkins is Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Culture and the Arts. She is an expert in contemporary women's fiction and feminist theory.

Susan's main research interests are in the field of contemporary women's fiction and feminist theory. She welcomes research students interested in all areas of women's prose fiction and feminist theory. Susan is a founder member and formerly Chair of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and previously an Associate Editor for the Oxford journal Contemporary Women's Writing. She was also Co-Editor until December 2015, with Dr Claire Chambers, of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Susan has previously published books on the Nobel prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, on scandalous fictions in the twentieth century, on twentieth-century women novelists and feminist theory and on British women’s writing 1945-1975. Her current book is about contemporary women’s post-apocalyptic writing. Since the millennium there has been an increase in the production of novels that imagine the end of the world as we know it as a consequence of climate change, globalisation, corporatisation and the unchecked excesses of technoscience. Contemporary women writers are no exception to this trend. Susan's project investigates the ways in which they write the apocalypse in different ways from male writers.

Current Teaching

Susan's main teaching interests are in contemporary women's fiction and feminist theory. On the BA (Hons) English Literature programme she teaches Twentieth-Century Literature: Alienation and Dystopia (Level 5) and Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Genre and Gender (Level 6 option). On the MA English: Contemporary Literature pathway, she contributes to the Creative Criticism module, leads the Literature in Practice module and teaches a specialist module on Apocalyptic Fictions.

Research Interests

As well as her interests in Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and contemporary women's dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, Susan is currently working on a project (with colleagues Professor Jayne Raisborough and Dr Rachel Connor) called Creatively Ageing about ageing and gender in the cultural industries.

0113 81 23375
S.Watkins@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Broadcasting Place - Humanities Building, 206, City Campus

Centre for Culture and the Arts

Ask Me About

Contemporary women's dystopian and apocalyptic fiction
Doris Lessing
Margaret Atwood
Ageing
Culture
Feminism
Gender
Literature

Selected Outputs

Watkins SM (2017) Science Fiction. In: Hanson C; Watkins S ed. The History of British Women's Writing Vol 9 1945-1975. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 273-288.
Watkins SM; Chambers C (2015) Writing Now. In: Eagleton M; Parker E ed. The History of British Women's Writing 1970-Present. London: Palgrave, pp. 247-265.
Watkins SM (2010) Issues of Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Fiction. In: Cockin K; Morrison J ed. The Post-War British Literature Handbook. Continuum International Publishing Group, pp. 161-176.

Raisborough J; Watkins S (2021) Critical Future Studies and Age: attending to future imaginings of age and ageing. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 13 (2),

https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.3156

View Repository Record
Raisborough J; Watkins S; Connor R; Pitimson N (2021) Reduced to Curtain twitchers? Age, ageism and the careers of four women actors. Journal of Women and Aging: the multidiciplinary quarterly of psychosocial practice, theory and research

https://doi.org/10.1080/08952841.2021.1910464

View Repository Record
Watkins SM (2019) Reimagining the Maternal in Jenny Diski’s and Doris Lessing’s Apocalyptic Imaginative Memoirs. Doris Lessing Studies, 36

https://dorislessingsociety.wordpress.com/doris-lessing-studies/current-issues/

View Repository Record
Watkins SM (2016) Second World Life Writing: Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin. Journal of Southern African Studies, 42 (1), pp. 137-148.

https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1121718

View Repository Record
Watkins SM (2013) "Summoning Your Youth at Will": Memory, Time and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing'. Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, 34 (2), pp. 222-224.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frontiers/v034/34.2.watkins.html
Watkins SM (2012) Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women's Fiction. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 23 (2), pp. 119-137.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2012.676490
Watkins SM; Eagleton M (2006) The Future of Fiction: The Future of Feminism. The Journal of Gender Studies, 15 (2),

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/15/2#.Ub8QFvnql8E

Watkins S (2020) Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
eds. Hanson C; Watkins S (2017) The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975: Volume Nine. Palgrave Macmillan.
Watkins S (2011) Doris Lessing. Manchester University Press.
Ridout A; Watkins S (2009) Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Continuum International Publishing Group.
Morrison J; Watkins S (2007) Scandalous Fictions. Palgrave Macmillan.
Watkins S (2001) Twentieth-Century Women Novelists. Palgrave Macmillan.