• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Amy Prodromou

Part 1 Tutor English Literature

Current Teaching

ENG 100 (Department of Engish and Creative Writing)

EAP Study Skills Course: English for Academic Purposes, Dept. of Linguistics and English Language LU (September 2008 & 2009)

Previous Teaching Posts From (2000-2007): Lecturer at the following institutions:University of Cyprus Language Centre;Intercollege, Cyprus; University of Sydney Learning Centre, Australia;Waymaker's College, North Sydney; P.A. College,Cyprus; University of Bridgeport,USA; Southern Connecticut State University,USA.

Subjects taught: English for Academic Purposes, English for Technical Purposes, Cambridge Advanced Exam, Composition and Research Skills, HSC English (A-Level equivalent), Introduction to Literature: Literature Across Cultures

Research Interests

Thesis Working Title:

The working title of my thesis is "'That Weeping Constellation': Narratives of Loss and Recovery in Contemporary Women's Writing"

'How does one honour, in grief, all that up-rises? And how then does one write of it?'

--Gail Jones ('Without Stars')

Although memoir uniquely satisfies "a desire to assert agency and subjectivity after several decades of insisting loudly on the fragmentation of identity and the death of the author" (Miller 12), it has often taken a backseat to autobiography studies within lifewriting criticism. As Helen Buss suggests, "[t]he study of memoirs from a theoretical and critical perspective informed by scholarly research is now overdue" (7-8).

I propose that the grief memoir—only recently advocated as a genre in its own right by Kathleen Fowler—fills a gap left by the professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to "that weeping constellation" (Jones 147) or community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert in Death's Door (2006) and Darian Leader in The New Black (2008). If, as Gilbert believes, we are at "a historical moment when death [is] in some sense unspeakable and grief—or anyway the expression of grief—[is] at best an embarrassment, at worst a social solecism or scandal" (xix), then the grief memoir can contribute to what Leader calls a much-needed "dialogue of mournings" (85) and shed new light on how we navigate loss.

What sets my chosen texts apart is the performance of complex "recovered" selves that show how "recovery," ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud's absolute recovery nor Tennyson's "loss forever new" (Laura Tanner), but rather, a space located somewhere in between.

Conferences:

"Inviting Ghosts In: Illness and Recovery in Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost" at "21st Century European Literatures: Mapping New Trends" (University of St. Andrew's, 15-17 September 2010).

" 'Memoirs of Textured Recovery': Loss and the Selfin Kim Mahood's Craft For A Dry Lake" at 7th Biennial IABA Conference "Life Writing and Intimate Publics" (University of Sussex, 28th June-1st July 2010).

" 'Memoirs of Textured Recovery':Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir" at Founding Conference IABA Europe "Life Writing in Europe" (VU University, Amsterdam, 29-31 October 2009).

"Writing the Self Into Being: Illness and Identity in Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's Eye and Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost" at "Identity and Form in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature" (Sheffield Hallam University,3-4 July 2009).

" 'No Bones Broken': (Dis)Embodiment and Recovery in Jenny Diski's Skating To Antarctica" at "Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies in Contemporary Women's Writing" (Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network,Oxford University, Sept. 2009).

Short story, "Girl Flights" at "Glocal Imaginaries" (Lancaster Univeristy, Sept. 2009).

"That Weeping Constellation: Navigating Loss in Contemporary Women's Memoir" at "Celebrating the Dead: Anniversaries and the Literary Afterlife" (Postgraduate conference, University of Bristol, April 2009).

Research Centres / Groups not included on FASS website:

· Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network (PG CWWN). http://www.cts.dmu.ac.uk/cwwn/

·Centre for Lifewriting Research, King's College London http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/hrc/life/

·IABA (International Auto/Biography Association) http://www.iaba.org.cn/index.htm

Would like to meet:

Students researching the following areas: Autobiography, memoir, contemporary women's writing, grief, illness, bereavement, embodiment, identity, performance, healing and recovery.

Additional Information

Construction of identity/ self-representation/ performance in contemporary memoir; narratives of displacement/ cross-cultural experience; the creative non-fiction crisis; cultural representations of loss; the therapeutic dimensions of writing; creative writing.

I'm currently working on a novel, sections of which have been published in journals including:Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus,EAPSU: An Online Journal of Critical and Creative Writing, and most recently in R.KV.R.Y Literary Journal and Blood Lotus: An Online Literary Journal.

«Back