Dr Julia Dallaway

Thesis title: The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Teaching: I am the incoming Study Mentor in English Literature at Exeter College and am also teaching visiting students at Mansfield and Regent's Park Colleges. I am still available to teach undergraduates and visiting students and to supervise dissertations in the academic year 2025–26; 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'), and have supervised multiple undergraduate dissertations. I have also taught/am currently teaching courses on 'Introduction to Contemporary English Literature', 'The Literary Essay', and 'Virginia Woolf' as part of Visiting Student Programmes at various colleges.

Research: My doctoral 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.

I am now preparing a postdoctoral research project entitled Autobiocartography, which will concentrate on late modernist memoirs that use place, rather than time, as their primary organising structure.

My research has been published or is forthcoming in the edited collections Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press) and Tramps: Remaking Contemporary Irish Fiction. I also write book reviews, including for Modernism/modernity, Critical Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement. For links to my creative work, see my personal website.

I have presented my work 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), and the British Association for Modernist Studies Conference (University of Leeds).

In 2021, I was on the judging panel for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

You can find me on Twitter/X @DallawayJulia.

Publications:

• '"How Mysterious, Our Instincts": Feminism and the Unconscious in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat'. In Tramps: Remaking Contemporary Irish Fiction, edited by Mary Burke and Tara Harney-Mahajan. Forthcoming.
• '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). Forthcoming. 
• '"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, Irish literature, women's writing, feminist theory, literature and religion, mysticism, cultural history