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Dr Hilary Hinds

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Gender and Women's Studies

Research Interests

Hilary Hinds's principal area of research is in early modern writing, particularly work by women from the radical sects of the second half of the seventeenth century. Her main publications in this area are God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester University Press, 1996), an edition of the prophet Anna Trapnel's The Cry of a Stone of 1654 (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), and the co-edited collection Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (Routledge, 1989). She has also published articles in a number of journals, including Literature and History, Renaissance and Reformation and Quaker Studies. She is now working, with Lancaster colleagues Alison Findlay and Meg Twycross, on a project entitled 'Quakers in North-West England and the Politics of Space, 1652-1653', examining the ways in which early Quakerism emerged from and was shaped by a series of distinctive spatial networks, comprising the landscape, alehouses, marketplaces, mountain-tops, 'steeplehouses', safe houses, and prisons of Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland. A pilot version of the website setting out the work of this project can be seen at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/quakers/

This work on early Quakerism resulted in a monograph entitled George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, published by Manchester University Press in 2011. In this, she examines the cultural impact of the doctrine of the indwelling Christ on the early Quaker movement. Conceiving of Christ's second coming as having already taken place, since he dwelt within believers such that they were 'flesh of Christ's flesh and bone of his bone', as Fox put it, meant that many of the conventional lines of demarcation between conceptual categories such as the spiritual and the social, masculine and feminine, past and present were dissolved, so that the Quakers dwelt within an almost seamless world of spiritual signification. The monograph investigates the discourses of elision and condensation through which early Quakers shaped, and were shaped by, this perception of the material and spiritual world.

Hilary Hinds's other main area of research interest is in twentieth-century women's writing and feminist theory. She is currently working on two interrelated projects: the first concerns the structuring of middlebrow women's fiction in the middle years of the twentieth century (such as the novels of E.M. Delafield, E. Arnot Robertson and Lettice Cooper) through trajectories of disappointment; an article arguing for the constitutive importance of disappointment in the faltering subjectivities of the female protagonists of this fictionappeared in Modern Fiction Studies (2009). Secondly, she is also working on a project which emerged from this study on interwar femininity and disappointment: namely, a cultural history of twin beds. This project investigates the mobilisation of twin beds within discourses of modernity, from their origins in late-nineteenth-century discussions of health and hygiene, to their signifying capacity within debates about marriage and sexuality in the twentieth century. An article resulting from this research, entitled 'Together and Apart: Twin Beds, Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage, 1890-1945', has been published in the Journal of Design History (2010) 23: 275-304. The article can be viewed here: http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/epq022?ijkey=okMsxy3wzZzS5xT&keytype=ref She is currently in receipt of funding from the Wellcome Trust, awarded to undertake work on the next phase of this project.

She would be interested in supervising research projects relating to any of the areas of research interest outlined above. She has supervised to completion PhDs on the following topics:

• Popular and High Culture in the early Stuart Court Masque
• Gender and Sexuality in Literary Constructions of Englishness, 1918-1945.
• Literary Self-Construction in the Diaries of Anne Lister
• Contemporary Sexualities: Community and Identity; a Case Study
• Robert Southwell and Late Elizabethan Rhetoric

Hilary Hinds has worked in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University since 2000. Before this, she worked at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education (now the University of Gloucestershire), and at Fircroft College of Adult Education, Birmingham. In 1999, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, Mount Holyoke College, USA, and in 2006 at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada.

Associated Keyword: English

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