Zoe Rucker

Thesis Title: Placing T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden within the Transatlantic Cultural Landscape: Anglo-American Modernist Poetry, Periodicals, and Publicity

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 

Doctoral Research: My research examines and compares the ways in 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 trace 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 and Auden's rise to canonicity. 

I’m currently Co-Editor of the Faculty’s graduate research journal, Oxford Research in English. 

Teaching: I have experience teaching Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1900-Present) and would be interested in supervising undergraduate dissertations that fall under any of my areas of research interests.