Anna Girling

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Biography

Background

I began a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Edinburgh in 2026. My project, 'Aestheticism and Cosmopolitan Worldmaking in the Late Colonial Caribbean', explores early-twentieth-century Jamaican writers' intense interest in cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and influence, and the ways that they navigated the relation between transnational and local commitment in their lives, works, and literary communities.

I completed my PhD at Edinburgh (on Edith Wharton, gay male literature, and literary decadence) in 2022. I also have an MA in English and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in English Literature from York University in Toronto.

From 2023 to 2026 I was an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Twentieth-Century English and American Literature here at Edinburgh, and have previously also taught at Edinburgh Napier University and York University in Toronto. 

In 2023 I won the Ben Bradlee Fellowship in Journalism at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) and also received a Princeton University Library Research Grant. In 2022-2023 I was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Memory, Narratives and History at the University of Brighton. I have previously also held an Eccles Centre Fellowship at the British Library, and have been an Affiliate at Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and a Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Edith Wharton Society (https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com). 

Undergraduate teaching

I have previously taught and/or lectured on:

Cities of Words: Twentieth-Century Urban American Writing

Decadence, Dazzle, Dissent: Aestheticism and Cultural Politics in the Long Twentieth Century

Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh

Literary Studies 1A

Literary Studies 2B

The American Novel, 1920-1960

The American Novel, 1970-2010

Postgraduate teaching

I have previously taught:

Decadence, Dazzle, Dissent: Aestheticism and Cultural Politics in the Long Twentieth Century

The American Novel, 1920-1960

The American Novel, 1970-2010

Literature and Modernity II: Late Modernism and Beyond

Areas of interest for supervision

Please note that I am not able to supervise PhD students. If you are interested in studying for a PhD in English at Edinburgh, you can learn more about the application process here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/postgraduate/phd/writing-a-research-proposal-for-the-phd-in-english

Research summary

My research explores the literary representation and theorisation of community, and the relationship between politics, power, gender, and literary form, in writing from across the twentieth century. I am interested in: anti-colonial literature and postcolonialism; intellectual and literary histories of solidarity and internationalism; literary decadence, aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism; women’s writing; Cold War literary cultures; middlebrow literature and crime writing; book and publishing history; periodical studies; gender, sexuality, camp, and queer studies; and many other aspects of twentieth-century prose writing from and about the UK, Europe, US, and Caribbean.

My current project, 'Aestheticism and Cosmopolitan Worldmaking in the Late Colonial Caribbean', aims to develop the first full account of Jamaican ‘cosmopolitan world-making’, exploring the intense interest of early-twentieth-century Jamaican writers in cosmopolitanism, transnational and local commitment, hybridity, and influence. Recuperating work by Jamaican writers who questioned the meaning of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in a colonially-hybridised context – often through engagement with Aesthetic literature (which, in emphasising aesthetic primacy, offered a means of transcending or covertly critiquing imperial and local imperatives) – I aim to establish new entwined and colonially-inflected genealogies of cosmopolitanism, aestheticism, and Jamaican literary history. You can read some of my early work from this project, about Una Marson, and her magazine the Cosmopolitan, here: https://www.the-tls.com/politics-society/the-media/our-young-people-essay-anna-girling

My PhD thesis, 'Edith Wharton and queer history at the fin de siècle', which I am currently revising for publication, places the American writer Edith Wharton in the context of European decadent literature, in particular a gay male literary tradition, and of the particular moment in the history of sexuality at which she was writing. I approach Wharton as a modernist scholar as well as an Americanist, and have used recent work in queer theory, decadent, and modernist studies, and cosmopolitanism – in conjunction with a rigorous historical contextualisation of her work – to reassess her career. I am also currently working on an article about Wharton's Cold War publishing history.

My current research also includes work on the writer, publisher, editor, and activist, Nancy Cunard, and in particular her anti-colonial and anti-fascist writings from the 1930s, and I am in the process of preparing an edition of her journalism for publication.

For recent publications and research activities, see my research profile here: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/anna-girling/

Recent publications:

For recent publications and research activities, see my research profile here: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/anna-girling/

Older publications:

Reviews

I also occasionally write reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/authors/anna-girling/).

I wrote this blog post (https://sgsahblog.com/2020/06/09/unfunded/) for the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities in the summer of 2020 about my experience of being an un-funded PhD student.

 

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