Erin Symons

Biography

Background

Erin Symons is a PhD candidate in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the broader literary-intellectual shifts surrounding the ‘Revolution in Criticism’ that occurred at Cambridge in the early decades of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on how the critical work of F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot figures in the novelistic practice of contemporary authors including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, J. M. Coetzee, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe. Her project is funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities AHRC Doctoral Training partnership.

Erin received her BA from the University of British Columbia in 2021 with a place on the Dean’s Honour List, followed by her MA (Hons.) in 2023. Her MA thesis, entitled “Literature Beyond Criticism: Ian McEwan in the School of F. R. Leavis,” was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and earned her a mark of distinction for its investigation of the formal and thematic relationship between McEwan’s postmillennial novels and his Leavisian critical training at ‘new’ universities in the era of postwar educational reform.

As an undergraduate, Erin worked as a freelance journalist, contributing articles and interviews and providing editorial support at a Canadian magazine. During her MA, she received university teaching accreditation from the University of British Columbia and taught first-year undergraduate English classes on Modern British Literature and Contemporary Environmental Literature. She currently acts as treasurer of the University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Society and co-organizer of the Literature and Languages Work-in-Progress Seminar Series.

Qualifications

MA (Hons.) – English Literature, University of British Columbia, 2023.

 

BA – English Literature, University of British Columbia, 2021.

 

Responsibilities & affiliations

T. S. Eliot Society – Member

Modern Languages Association - Member

University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Society - Treasurer

School of Literature, Languages and Culture Work in Progress Seminar Series - co-organizer

 

Current project grants

Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership

Past project grants

BUTEX Award (2019)
Hugh M. Brock Education Abroad Scholarship (2019)
UBC Deputy Vice-Chancellor Scholarship (2019)
UBC Faculty of Arts Graduate Award (2021)
SSHRC Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship Award (2022)

Conference details

University of British Columbia EndNotes Conference, Vancouver (Invited Speaker). “Inscribing the (Anti)Body in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” May 2022.

 

T. S. Eliot International Society Annual Meeting, St. Louis (Invited Speaker). “Postcoloniality, Order and Myth: T. S. Eliot and Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease,” September 2024.

 

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