BA (Manchester), MA (Hertfordshire), PhD (Cantab), Cert.Ed (Cantab), Advanced Dip. Ed (Cantab), Diploma in Film Studies (London)

Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing


Room: Hel 264

Email: mary.joannou@anglia.ac.uk

Telephone: 0845 196 2049
International: +44 1223 363271 ext 2049


Professor Mary Joannou's research activity

Mary is a specialist in early twentieth-century, late Victorian, and contemporary women's writing. Her latest book is Women's Writing, Englishness, National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice 1938-1960. Her first monograph, "Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows": Women's Writing, Feminism and Social Change 1918-1938, was on the Choice (USA) list of outstanding academic books for 1995. Her second was Contemporary Women's Writing: From the Golden Notebook to the Color Purple. The new book links the two earlier ones together chronologically and also retrieves neglected and forgotten writers, reading them alongside others like Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen whose reputation would now appear secure in an attempted feminist remapping of twentieth-century literary history. Her edited volume in The Palgrave History of British Women's Writing (volume eight) is to be published in 2012.

Her previous publications reflect two other research areas in which she enjoys working; the literature of labour, and the literature and history of the 1930s. She has an edited essay collection, Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History and two other co-edited volumes; The Women's Suffrage Movement (with June Purvis) and Heart of the Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Honour of Margot Heinemann (with David Margolies), as well as a critical edition of Ellen Wilkinson's novel Clash (with Ian Haywood). She has also guest edited special journal editions on the 1930s for Literature and History and Critical Survey (with John Lucas) and a special issue of Women: a Cultural Review (with Lucie Armitt and Paulina Palmer).

Mary is currently on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Women's Writing and has served on the steering committee of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network. Until recently she was the convenor of the Women's History Network. She also held the position of Fleur Cowles Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Centre in the University of Texas at Austin (2000-2001) and is a Fellow of the English Association.

In her time at Anglia Ruskin she has organized two major international conferences on the 1930s, in 1997 and 2000, and smaller conferences on Storm Jameson (2005), Sylvia Townsend Warner (2006), Winifred Holtby (2007), Rosamond Lehmann (2009) and Elizabeth Taylor (2012).


Areas of supervision

Mary welcomes research students in any of her areas of interest (please see her research activity for more information), but especially:

• Women's Suffrage
• Working-class writing, autobiographical writing, and the literature of labour
• Late Victorian and early twentieth-century women's writing
• The literature and history of the 1930s

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