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

Doctoral research: My research considers 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 offer 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 coin 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 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 British Association for Modernist Studies Conference (University of Leeds), the Elizabeth Bowen Society Conference (University of Bedfordshire), 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).

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 Tramp Press: Ireland's Maverick Publisher (Bucknell University Press). I also write book reviews, including for Modernist Cultures, Critical Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement. For links to my creative work, see my personal website.

I have experience of teaching Prelims Paper 4 ('Literature in English 1910–Present') and FHS Paper 6 ('Writing Lives'), and have supervised undergraduate dissertations. I have also taught tutorial courses on 'Introduction to Contemporary English Literature' and 'The Literary Essay' as part of the Visiting Student Programmes at Worcester College and Mansfield College, respectively.

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

You can find me on Twitter @DallawayJulia.

Publications:

• '"How Mysterious, Our Instincts": Feminism and the Unconscious in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat'. In Tramp Press: Ireland's Maverick Publisher, edited by Mary Burke and Tara Harney-Mahajan. Bucknell University Press, 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 vol. 66, no. 2 (July 2024): 126–32.

Research interests: life-writing, the essay form, literary modernism, memory studies, spatial literary studies, Irish literature, women's writing, feminist theory, literature and philosophy, literature and religion, mysticism, cultural history