Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
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 (in press with Palgrave) 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 and Twenty-First Century Literatures: Alienation and Dystopia (Level 5) and Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Genre and Gender (Level 6 option). On the MA English Literature pathway, she contributes to the Creative Criticism module and teaches a specialist module on Apocalyptic Fictions.
Susan is the co-editor of Studying Literature: A Practical Introduction, which is a guide to the pleasures and pitfalls of studying English literature at degree level. It contains, amongst other things, chapters on essay writing, giving oral presentations and using literary theory, as well as her own chapter on reading prose fiction.
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) with the RepresentAge theatre group about ageing and gender.
Ask Me About
- Literature
- Feminism
Selected Outputs
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Watkins SM (2016) Second World Life Writing: Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin. Journal of Southern African Studies, 42 (1), pp. 137-148.
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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
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Watkins SM (2012) Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women's Fiction. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 23 (2), pp. 119-137.
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Watkins SM; Eagleton M (2006) The Future of Fiction: The Future of Feminism. The Journal of Gender Studies, 15 (2),
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Watkins SM (1998) Sex Change and Media Change: Woolf's Orlando and Potter's Film Version. Mosaic (Winnipeg, 1967): a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 31 pp. 41-59.
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Watkins S (2020) Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
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eds. Hanson C; Watkins S (2017) The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975: Volume Nine. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Watkins S (2011) Doris Lessing. Manchester University Press.
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Ridout A; Watkins S (2009) Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Continuum International Publishing Group.
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Morrison J; Watkins S (2007) Scandalous Fictions. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Watkins S (2001) Twentieth-Century Women Novelists. Palgrave Macmillan.
News & Blog Posts
Covid-19 and Culture - podcast mini-series
The Best Books to Read in Quarantine
From Apocalypse and Dystopia to Bridget Jones’s Diary – International Women’s Day and Women’s Writing
From Apocalypse and Dystopia to Bridget Jones’s Diary – International Women’s Day and Women’s Writing
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