Evie Sutcliffe

Thesis title: Emergency Forms: Formal Hybridity in the Works of Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Rukeyser, and Rebecca West, 1935 - 1937 

Supervisor: Prof. Kate McLoughlin

Research interests: 1930s; war writing; interwar women's writing; emergency writing; formal hybridity; American Great Depression; Spanish Civil War; New Reportage; photojournalism

Evie is a first-year DPhil candidate in the English Faculty, whose thesis asks the question: How does emergency shape literary form?

Emergency Forms interrogates the literary responses to emergency in the 1935 - 1937 works of American journalist Martha Gellhorn, American poet Muriel Rukeyser, and British writer Rebecca West. Building on the idea that political crisis necessarily demands a reactive reappraisal of existing literary forms, it argues that what emerges out of emergency is formal hybridity in these writers' workers. Emergency literary genres require an equivalent emergency critical response. The hybrid works of Gellhorn, Rukeyser and West mandate a methodology of real-time reading, which is distinctive in both time and space. The critic as myops pays attention to both autobiographical and historical details, analysing minutely how form is adopted, adapated and reformed in exceptional times in the mid-twentieth century through a method of 'super-close reading' of primary texts and their extant documents. 

Evie completed her BA in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019 - 2022). She was funded by the Cambridge Trust for the MPhil in English at Newnham College, University of Cambridge (2024 - 2025). Between her BA and DPhil, she worked in outreach at Exeter College, Oxford. Her DPhil is fully funded for four years by the Oxford-Helena Kennedy Graduate Crankstart Scholarship at Mansfield College. She works as a Life-Writing Seminar Support Worker at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW).