Dr Zoe Rucker
Thesis Title: Resident Aliens: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and the Transatlantic Cultural Landscape
Supervisor: Professor Seamus Perry
Research Interests: expatriate experience, twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, literary modernism, modernist periodical print culture, history of the book, editorial theory, the history of English Literature as an academic discipline
Teaching: I am currently working towards Associate Fellowship recognition with the HEA. I teach widely across the period of 1830 - Present and have designed and delivered a module for visiting undergraduates on 'Writers and the Cinema'. I would welcome any enquiries for teaching Prelims Papers 1B, 3, or 4 this academic year or next.
This year, I am supervising three undergraduate dissertations on a range of topics falling within the early to mid twentieth century and would be interested to hear from students hoping to work on any of my areas of research interest.
Alongside teaching, I am also a Study Adviser for Humanities subjects at Balliol College.
Doctoral Research: I am now transforming my thesis into a monograph for publication. My research examined and compared the ways through which T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden self-fashioned and circulated their transnational identities. By reading individual pieces of these writers' works within the context of their original publications in the small press periodicals frequently associated with literary modernism, I traced how and why they constructed and performed multiple (and often contradictory) versions of their complex national identities, in relation to the different sets of audiences on each side of the Atlantic they sought to ‘address’. In testing the major classification markers of nationality and cultural identity in this way, I argue for the centrality of these writers' multifaceted, expatriate identities to their unprecedented influence and renown, offering a new perspective on Eliot's and Auden's rise to canonicity.
Publications:
(Invited),'Evelyn Waugh and the English Educational Establishment', The Oxford Handbook of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Naomi Milthorpe and Beci Carver (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
'Editorialising Englishness: T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and Interwar National Identity', Review of English Studies (2025), <https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res/hgaf071/828...
'Review of Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour by Robert Volpicelli’, International Yeats Studies, 6.2 (Summer, 2023).
'T. S. Eliot, the Little Review, and Transnational Print Culture', Modernist Review (8 November 2021).
