Alisha Palmer (BA Hons, MA)

Thesis title: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women's Abortion Narratives, 1920-1940

Biography

Background

I joined the English department at Edinburgh in January 2022 after completing my MA at the University of Exeter in 2021, where I graduated with a Dean's Commendation for Exceptional Performance.

I work at the intersections of English literature and the history of sexuality. My PhD thesis uses queer theories of negativity to explore the representations of abortion in female-authored modernist literature. I have articles and book chapters forthcoming on abortion, modernist aesthetics and politics with Palgrave Macmillan, Feminist Modernist Studies, Feminist Theory and Women's History Review. 

Alongside my research I have taught undergraduate modules on literature from 1300 to the present in the English department at Edinburgh, where I was nominated for a EUSA Teaching Award for Student Tutor of the Year. I also teach modernism for the Scottish Universities International Summer School. 

I am the current Editor-in-Chief of FORUM, the University of Edinburgh's postgraduate journal of culture and the arts.

I am a member of the Culture and the Reproductive Body research network. 

Qualifications

BA Hons in English Literature (Exeter)

MA in English Literary Studies: Criticism and Theory (Exeter) 

Responsibilities & affiliations

Steering Committee, Culture and the Reproductive Body Research Network

Editor-in-Chief, FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts

Undergraduate teaching

Literary Studies 1A, University of Edinburgh (undergraduate tutor and assessor)

Literary Studies 1B, University of Edinburgh (undergraduate tutor and assessor)

Text and Context: Modernism, Scottish Universities Summer School (tutor and assessor):  https://www.suiss.ed.ac.uk/programme/text-context-course-2/

Research summary

My research interests span literary and theoretical engagements with the body, nature, and sexuality. 

Current research interests

My current research is focussed on the representation of abortion in British women's literature from 1900-1940.

Past research interests

In the past I have written about abortion in America in the early twentieth century, in post-colonial literature, in politics, and in queer theory. I have also written about ecocriticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and posthumanism.

Organiser

Culture and the Reproductive Body Research Network Symposium 2023

Postgraduate Gender Research Network 2023

Papers delivered

"Weird Bodies, Queer Temporalities and Strange Aesthetics: Abortion in Jean Rhys's 'Voyage in the Dark' (1934)",  MSA/BAMS Joint Conference: "Weird Modernisms", 2026

"'Blood and pain and ugliness': Abortion and the Political Power of Negativity in Naomi Mitchison's 'We Have Been Warned'", Abortion at the Borderlines Conference, 2023

"Reading and Writing Abortion: Textual Uncertainty in Marie Stopes's 'Mother England' and Contemporary Reproductive Regimes", Northern Network of Medical Humanities Conference: "Critical Medical Humanities", 2023

"Prophecy, Mythology and Other Reproductive Technologies: Abortion and Modernist Aesthetics in Marie Stopes's 'The Vortex Dammed'", Culture and the Reproductive Body Symposium, 2023

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