Spotlight on Staff: Dr Minna Jeffery

minna jeffery

Tell us about your research interests

My research is in drama and theatre studies. My PhD was about how to translate plays in an explicitly feminist way, and expanding out of that my research interests lie in feminist, queer and political theatre, and in theatre translation generally. The language I translate from is Finnish, so a lot of my research is on Finnish theatre. At the moment I’m working on a book of annotated translations of four plays by a nineteenth-century Finnish playwright called Minna Canth. I’m also starting to mull over a new project around staging solidarity.

Which book has had the biggest impact on you?

Encountering Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a teenager really shifted my understanding of what theatre was, the shape it could take and what it could do. This understanding shifted again when I read Sarah Kane as an undergraduate.

Minna Canth’s plays are the reason I’m in academia now. I had so many questions after reading them – not least ‘why doesn’t everyone know about her?’ – that doing a PhD felt like the only way of starting to tackle them.

What do you do in your spare time?

I go to the theatre as much as I can; swim in big bodies of water; sing; read; cook; go to the pub with friends.

Describe your ideal day.

Tea and a book in bed, followed by a long, slow swim in a lake, and then a really good breakfast. Then perhaps a bit of pottering about somewhere pretty, coffee with a good friend, a gentle bit of writing or translating. A tiny little afternoon siesta, ideally lying on the grass or in a hammock or something, preferably in the sun and caressed by a gentle breeze. Then spending some time cooking an elaborate and delicious but stress-free dinner whilst listening (and obviously singing along) to music, and eating said dinner with a big group of people I love. Ideally a couple of hours of post-dinner dancing, and finally some time looking at the moon and/or stars and having the sort of conversation that you can only have very late at night whilst looking at the moon and/or stars, then bed.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

I hope it’s not too unimaginative to say that my current splitting-of-time between Oxford and London is pretty dreamy! Or Berlin. Berlin would be cool.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Other than a brief defection to film when I was about 13 (it seemed more glamorous), all I wanted until my early 20s was to write and direct plays.

Who were your childhood heroes?

Snufkin from the Moomins. What’s cooler than smoking a pipe, playing the harmonica, living in a tent, caring about social justice, and being unbelievably chill?

What teacher had the greatest impact on you?

My secondary school Drama teacher and my sixth form English teacher. Both made me feel that they took me and my work seriously (which is not a given at school) and encouraged me to work on the things I was interested in, even if those things were outside the school curriculum, and helped me to feel creatively and academically empowered. Both instilled a belief in the value of caring deeply and of wit and humour, alongside academic rigour.

Do you have pets?

My dream is to stride about with an elegant greyhound or two, but we’ll have to see whether I ever live somewhere big enough to accommodate them.

Were you popular as a teenager?

With hindsight, I think I had a very annoying and self-righteous commitment to ‘not caring’ about such ‘trivial mundanities’ as ‘being popular’, so honestly I’m lucky I was tolerated (indulged, even!) by my lovely friends.

What is your favourite music?

I like to think of myself as someone who listens to lots of different things, but every year my Spotify Unwrapped reveals that I mostly listen to choral music from c.1500-1750 (Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel). I love lots of other stuff though, I swear! I love alt-indie and alt-folk music, some favourites being: The Mountain Goats, Villagers, Laura Marling, Joanna Newsom, Marika Hackman, Lucy Dacus, The Magnetic Fields, for example.

What do you like most about your job? What do you like least?

I love being able to chat to brilliant colleagues and students about fascinating things all the time. I love being able to think deeply about things, and having breakthroughs in my own and students’ work. Unsurprisingly, as an early-career academic, the thing I like least is the precarity and the feeling of watching parts of the sector crumble around me.

Why are we here?

Perhaps to have as good a time as we can, and to do what we can to ensure that everyone is afforded the same opportunity.

If you weren’t a member of the English Faculty, what would you be?

I’m lucky (or greedy, or something even less generous, depending on who’s making the assessment) in that I currently have a sort of multi-hyphenate career. I’m a researcher-teacher-translator-theatre-maker-singer. Perhaps if I weren’t here and were brave enough I’d commit more to any one of those things!

 

Dr Minna Jeffery is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in Drama at St Anne’s College. Her research centres around theatre translation, women’s playwriting, queer and feminist theatre, and Finnish theatre. She completed her PhD by practice as research at the University of Kent in 2023, where her doctoral research proposed and examined strategies for feminist theatre translation through translating Minna Canth’s The Worker’s Wife (1885) from Finnish to English. In addition to her research and translation work, Minna is a theatre-maker producing work with her company Good Friends for a Lifetime.