Dr Megan Girdwood

Lecturer in English Literature, 1880-1940

Biography

Background

I joined Edinburgh as a Lecturer in English Literature, 1880-1940 in August 2024. My research focuses broadly on late nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, with particular interests in modernism, performance, embodiment, and dance. In 2024-25, I will undertake a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support an ongoing project on modernism and the sense of movement. 

I'm originally from Edinburgh though I mainly grew up in Renfrewshire, near Glasgow. I completed my BA in English and MPhil in Modern & Contemporary Literature at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the University of York to complete an AHRC-funded PhD in the department of English and Related Literature. I then held an Early Career Fellowship at Edinburgh and spent three years in the English department at Durham University as an Assistant Professor in Modern Literature. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Undergraduate teaching

I have taught on a wide range of modules at Edinburgh, including:

  • English Literature 1 (pre-Hons tutorials)
  • English Literature 2 (pre-Hons tutorials)
  • Edinburgh in Fiction/ Fiction in Edinburgh (3rd year Honours Option)
  • Global Modernisms: Inter/national Responses to Modernity (4th year Honours Core Period Course)
  • Fin de Siècle into Modern (4th year Honours Option)

Postgraduate teaching

I have taught PG modules including:

  • Global Modernisms: Inter/national Responses to Modernity (PG version)
  • MSc Dissertation Supervision

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

My first book, 'Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome's Dance after 1890', was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. It examines the relationship between modernist literature and dance via the iconography of Salome and her famous dance of the seven veils, analysing case studies from modernist drama, dance, silent film, fiction, and poetry. 'Salomania' became a widespread phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, surfacing in the work of major writers such as Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, as well as modern dancers and film performers, including Loïe Fuller, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, and Ninette de Valois. This book was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.

I am currently developing this research on dance and the body in a book provisionally titled 'Kinaesthetic Modernism: Writing the Sense of Movement, 1880-1940'. This book traces the history of kinaesthesia, the sense of movement, across a wide range of scientific and aesthetic contexts, from psychological laboratories in Europe and the US to Italian art galleries, modern dance studios, literary salons, and psychiatric hospitals. It suggests that, far from a peripheral modality, kinaesthesia was modernism's sixth sense and found its most influential expression in modernist women's writing and performance. Figures of particular interest include Vernon Lee, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Kathleen Cannell, and Emily Holmes Coleman. Research for this project has been supported by a Houghton Library Fellowship at Harvard University and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

My publications have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Modernist Cultures, ELH, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Irish Studies Review. I was awarded the British Association for Modernist Studies Essay Prize in 2020. I am also a member of the Moving Bodies Lab at Durham's Institute for Medical Humanities. This is part of the Discovery Research Platform funded by the Wellcome Trust. You can find out more about the Lab here: https://medhumsplatform.org/labs/moving-bodies/

Current project grants

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2024-25: 'Kinaesthetic Modernism: Writing the Sense of Movement, 1880-1940' (PI, £51,326)

Past project grants

Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship, Harvard University (2023-24)
White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities Doctoral Studentship, University of York (2014-2018)

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