Dr Julia Dallaway
Teaching: I currently hold the posts of MSt Postdoctoral Mentor (for MSt English 1900–present) at the Faculty of English and Study Mentor in English at Exeter College. I also teach various courses as part of the Visiting Student Programmes at Worcester College, Mansfield College, and Exeter College, including 'Literature in English 1830–1910', 'Literature in English 1910–Present', 'Victorian Literature', 'Modernism', 'Introduction to Contemporary English Literature', 'The Literary Essay', 'Writing Lives', 'Virginia Woolf', and 'Joan Didion'. Meanwhile, I work for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing as a Workshop Coordinator, organising the twice-termly Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops.
I am available to teach undergraduate papers in the academic year 2026–27; please get in touch if you are interested. I have experience of teaching Prelims Paper 1B ('Introduction to Literature'), Prelims Paper 4 ('Literature in English 1910–Present'), and FHS Paper 6 ('Writing Lives'). I have previously supervised (or am currently supervising) undergraduate dissertations on various modern writers including Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, and Anaïs Nin.
Research: My research focuses on formally experimental ways of telling a life story. I am currently adapting my doctoral thesis into a monograph entitled The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion. My thesis considered how twentieth-century life-writing turned towards the form of the literary essay, due to its distinct affordances for representing the workings of memory. At a time when psychologists began to conceive of memory as episodic, associative, constructive, and place-based, writers widely questioned the autobiographical convention of linear, continuous narrative. I offered three case studies of Anglophone essayists from across the century—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), and Joan Didion (1934–2021)—who each drew on the essay's techniques of fragmentation, association, and inconclusiveness in order to attempt a more accurate representation of memory. I coined a new term "the memory essay" to read texts usually considered as essays alongside those typically viewed as memoirs, focalising my analysis through a dominant metaphor for memory in each writer's work.
Following the completion of my DPhil, I am now working on a variety of new research projects on the following topics: literary essays about migraines; the emergence of the "memoir-in-essays" form; the idea of unlived lives or "shadow lives" in modern and contemporary life-writing; and late modernist "autobiocartography" (memoirs that use place, rather than time, as their primary organising structure).
Publications:
- '"Images That Shimmer Around the Edges": Migraine Auras and Blurry Perception in the Essays of Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, and Brian Dillon' [under review].
- 'Feminism and the Unconscious in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat'. In Tramp Press: Remaking Irish Writing, edited by Mary Burke and Tara Harney-Mahajan. Syracuse University Press, forthcoming June 2027.
- 'Unacknowledged Longing'. Review of Waiting for a Party, by Vesna Main. Times Literary Supplement 6388 (September 19, 2025): 43.
- 'Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey (review)'. Modernism/modernity 31, no. 2 (April 2025): 387–89.
- '"Floating Incidents": The Ethics of the Essay as a Life-Writing Form in "A Sketch of the Past"'. In Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Amy C. Smith and Paola Brinkley, 43–51. Clemson University Press, 2025.
- 'The Art of Precarity'. Review of The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin, by Nonia Williams. Critical Quarterly 66, no. 2 (July 2024): 126–32.
Research interests: life-writing, the essay form, literary modernism, memory studies, spatial literary studies/literature and place, literature and philosophy, cognitive literary studies, Irish literature, American literature, women's writing, feminist theory, literature and religion, mysticism, Quakerism, cultural history
