Visiting Scholars

2017-18 Scholars

Sandra Mayer is a senior teaching and research associate in English Literature at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She has just completed her monograph Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience (Rodopi) and, in collaboration with OCLW, is currently working on a project – Art and Action – that explores the interrelations of literary celebrity and politics in and through autobiographical life-writing genres. Her co-edited journal special issue on the theme of “Life-Writing and Celebrity” for Life Writing is forthcoming in 2018.

Katherine Collins is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, working with life-writing methods to study the impact of Brexit on the lives of expatriated Britons in EU27. She has just been awarded a bursary from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to undertake a prosopographical survey of British expatriate communities in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published ethnographic poetry and short stories, and is writing a collection of short stories about the lives of the women in her family.

Peter Ackers, was Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour History at Loughborough University, UK, until 2015, where he is now a Visiting Professor. He was Joint Editor of Labour History Review from 2001-4 and is on the management committee of History & Policy: Trade Union Forum. His PhD was a biographical study of the relationship between trade union leadership and religious nonconformity. Ackers and Reid (eds) Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan) appeared in 2016.

John Francis Davies, is an affiliate to and former scholarship holder at OCLW, who recently defended a fully-funded doctorate in English. At Harvard University, he was recipient of the Joan Nordell Fellowship at Houghton, 2016-17. His thesis was entitled, ‘Tennyson in the Archive: Process and Materiality in the Early Manuscripts, 1827-1851.’ John also runs the ‘Lives and Letters’ research strand and previously ran the OCLW Tea Talks each term at Wolfson College, where Visiting Scholars, ECRs, and Fellows present and receive feedback on research in progress.

Alexis Brown, recently completed her doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford, supported by a Rhodes scholarship and an Oxford Centre for Life-Writing Doctoral Award. Her thesis, “The Author on Film: Life-Writing in the Cinema”, concerns the adaptation of post-war autobiographical literature. Her research interests are in life-writing, documentary, historical and biopic film, as well as twentieth-century literature. She recently conducted an interview with director Clio Barnard at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.