Julia Dallaway

Provisional thesis title: The Essay as a Life-Writing Form Among Twentieth-Century Women Writers 

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Doctoral research: I am looking at the literary forms in which people choose to express their lived experiences. Recent research across the fields of philosophy (Galen Strawson), historiography (Hayden White), and life-writing studies (Hermione Lee) warns of how narrative life-writing can tend towards inauthenticity and reductiveness. In light of these concerns, I present the literary essay (from the French verb essayer, "to attempt") as an alternative life-writing form that—being characteristically tentative, associative, and partial—might allow a person's experience and memories to be depicted with more realistic complexity. In particular, my thesis pays attention to twentieth-century women writers who turn to the essay form for their autobiographical writings, including Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), and Joan Didion (1934-2021).

I have presented my research at national and international conferences, including the International Auto/Biography Association Europe Conference (University of Warsaw), the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Lamar University, Texas), the Oxford English Graduate Conference and the Modern and Contemporary Literature Graduate Forum (both Oxford's Faculty of English), and the Franks Society Talks (Worcester College, Oxford).

I have a paper forthcoming in Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2024), entitled '"Floating Incidents": The Ethics of the Essay as a Life-Writing Form in "Sketch of the Past"'.

I was previously on the judging panel for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography in 2021.

I have experience of teaching Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910-Present) and FHS Paper 6 (Writing Lives), and have supervised undergraduate dissertations, especially on Virginia Woolf.

I also write book reviews, two of which can be viewed here: https://oxonianreview.com/authors/julia-dallaway.

You can find me on Twitter @DallawayJulia.

Research interests: life-writing, the essay form, women's writing, narratology, modernism, feminist theory, literature and philosophy, literature and religion, mysticism, cultural history