Centre for Women's Studies
Alice Myers
PhD student
Profile
Biography
I graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2018 with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and American Studies before completing my MA in Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London in 2019. During my BA and MA, I developed my academic interest in the representation of American women in literary and non-literary texts. At undergraduate level, my dissertation focused on the representation of young women and the relationship between this representation and 19th-century manners and expectations of femininity in works by Henry James and Edith Wharton. For my MA dissertation, I focused on the fictional representation of the single woman, a figure who evoked intense anxiety in late 19th century and early 20th century American culture. Examining “single woman” characters in Progressive-era texts, my dissertation interrogated how these representations embodied anxieties about changing cultural norms and contributed to longstanding suspicions about autonomous women.
In my PhD research, which I am completing in the Centre for Women’s Studies, I am turning my attention to women’s contemporary self-representation in the context of the confessional literary tradition.
Research
Overview
Confessional aesthetics in North American women’s self-representation on social media My project seeks to provide insight into how North American women engage with and/or destabilise the confessional literary tradition via social media. Working at the intersection of media, autobiography studies, and feminist theory, my project will read female creators’ social media content as life-writing, using a literary-critical approach rooted in autobiography studies.
