Dr Emma Rees

Senior Lecturer

Qualifications

BA, PhD, PGC Learning and Teaching (HE), FHEA

Overview

I am Senior Lecturer in English.

I'm on the editorial board of Cardiff's 'Gender Forum' journal; I'm a reviewer for the journal 'Psychology and Sexuality', for the GEA (Gender and Education Association) and for 'Thirdspace: a Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture' ; additionally I'm an individual affiliate of CISSGE (the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe) and of the GEA; additionally, I'm affiliated to IASSCS (the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society).

I was born and bred in Birmingham, and I took my BA and PhD at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. In my life outside uni I enjoy spending time with my family, my 4 cats, and my dog. I love: music of many sorts (I have seen Metallica live 29 times, in 4 countries); going to the cinema (favourite films include 'Apocalypse Now', 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Homicide'); watching Tottenham Hotspur FC; and eating imaginative vegetarian food (I don't tend to do all of these things at the same time!).

Teaching

I specialise in Renaissance literature, and in representations of mental illness in literature and on film. Undergraduate and MA modules on which I teach or lecture include:

Postgraduate supervision:

I currently supervise a PhD student working on genre and gender in Shakespeare; in 2009 another supervisee of mine successfully completed her PhD on Shakespeare on screen. I welcome enquiries about research projects on:

  • Gender and representation
  • Renaissance literature

Research

My wider research and teaching interests include Shakespeare studies; early modern literature and culture; film theory (especially screen adaptations of literary texts), and gender studies. I enjoy teaching, researching and writing, and regularly speak at conferences throughout Europe. I am currently working on a monograph, Can't, on representations of the female body in late-20th- and early-21st-century culture.

Books:

  • Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004).

Recent Essays and Articles: 

  • ‘Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman', in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, eds Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge (Liverpool: U of Liverpool P, forthcoming 2010) 
  • ‘Cordelia's Can't: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear', in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Vaught (London: Ashgate, forthcoming, 2010);

Continuum, forthcoming 2010)  

  • Richard E. Wilson and Emma L. E. Rees, ‘Sometimes a Guitar is Just a Guitar', in Led Zeppelin and Philosophy, ed. Scott Calef (Chicago: Open Court, 2009), pp. 63-74
  • entry on ‘Sexual Politics' for the Encyclopaedia of Sex and Society (2009);
  • book review for English, the Journal of the English Association (2009)  

  • ‘A Well-Spun Yarn: Margaret Cavendish and Homer's Penelope', in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. by Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 171-81
  • ‘Triply Bound: Genre and the Exilic Self', in Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, ed. by Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (New Jersey: Associated UP, 2003), pp. 23-39; 
  • ‘Sheela's Voracity and Victorian Veracity', in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2002), pp. 116-27

  • ‘‘Sweet honey of the Muses: Lucretian resonance in Poems, and Fancies', In-Between: Essays in Literary Criticism, 9: 1 & 2 (2000), pp. 3-16;
  • ‘Guest Editor's Introduction', Women's Writing, 4: 3 (1997), pp. 319-21;
  • ‘Heaven's Library and Nature's Pictures: Platonic paradigms and trial by genre', Women's Writing, 4:3 (1997), pp. 369-81.

Who to contact