Current PhD Students

Bryony Aitchison

Thesis Title:

The Queer Gardens of Modernism: Violets and Violent Alliances

Supervisor:

Dr Hannah Roche

Description: 

My PhD thesis proposes that in order to understand and articulate sexual identity, modernist women writers turn to plant life and the garden. Drawing attention to the limitations of sexology and psychoanalysis, Amy Lowell, H.D., Vita Sackville-West, and Virgina Woolf all engage with the study of botany and the craft of gardening to shed light on their experiences of gender and sexuality. Proposing the garden as the home of queer women’s identity in the modernist period, the thesis traverses the gardens and horticultural texts that underpin these four writers creative, and at times eccentric, explorations of gender and sexuality in their poetry and prose. All four writers, I argue, intervene in the tradition of women’s nature writing by using flowers to explore a variety of sexual identities. In their modernist poetry and life writing, “nature” is diverse and adaptable, and the space of the garden is used to cultivate queer forms of self-expression.

I began my AHRC funded PhD in 2020, having received a MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of York and a BA in English from the University of Exeter. Alongside my PhD research, I run nature-based poetry workshops and co-organise walks as part of the HRC postdoctoral fellowship “Transdisciplinary Walks: Speculative Histories and Soundscapes of North Yorkshire.” I am also the author of Spanscapes and the co-editor of GMC21:Twenty-first Century Architecture in Manchester and Salford, both of which were published by The Modernist Society in 2023.