Staff profile
| Affiliation | Room number | Telephone |
|---|---|---|
| Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Studies |
Biography
I joined the Department of English at Durham in 2018, having previously worked as a Teaching Fellow at Newcastle University. My research and teaching interests span from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and forcus on the intersections of space, mobility, embodiment, and gender in literature and culture.
My monograph, Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature: Passing Through, was published with Palgrave in 2019, and considers the complex ways in which the hotel functions to express the shifting experiences of modernity in the works of such authors as Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen. The book contributes to the critical debates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature concerning space, movement, and mobility, arguing that the hotel reconfigures boundaries of modernist, middlebrow, and popular fiction. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical perspectives, my book provides a critical and cultural history of the hotel in British literature, charting its changing nature and usage from the mid-nineteenth century up until the interwar period.
My current research focuses on British traveller Gertrude Bell, and explores the complex and lasting impact of Bell’s own literary and cultural imagination to British understandings of the Middle East up to the present day.
In 2020/21, I am teaching on the second-year module, Literature of the Modern Period, and on the third-year special topic module, Reading Joyce's Ulysses. I supervise dissertation students working on modern and contemporary literature.
For 2020/21, my office hours will take place on Wednesdays, 11am-12pm, via Zoom. Please email me for a timeslot and meeting URL.
Publications
Authored book
- Short, Emma (2019). Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature: Passing Through. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter in book
- Short, E. (2019). ‘One is Somehow Suspended’ Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, and the Spaces in Between. In Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things. Gildersleeve, J. & Smith, P.J. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Short, Emma (2013). ‘“Always coming and going” The In-Between Spaces of Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Novels’. In Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces. Gómez Reus, Teresa & Gifford, Terry Palgrave.
- Short, Emma (2012). ‘Making Up, or Making Over: Reconstructing the Modern Female Author’. In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction. Cooper, Katherine & Short, Emma Palgrave.
Edited book
- Johnston, Rosemary R., Paul, Lissa & Short, Emma (2019). Children's Literature & Culture of the First World War. Children's Literature and Culture. Routledge.
- Cooper, Katherine & Short, Emma (2012). The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction. Palgrave.
Journal Article