English with Creative Writing

The Land Beyond the Archive: Emily Gerard and the Creative Recovery of a Shadowed Legacy

My doctoral research is a textual recovery project dedicated to the Scottish writer Emily Gerard. Traditional scholarship has long overshadowed Gerard by treating her merely as a passive source of Transylvanian folklore for male contemporary writers. My research directly challenges this erasure by evaluating her autonomous voice as a fiction writer.

I am mapping the strong lines of feminist body horror, physical dysmorphia, and institutional containment running through her solo creative output—creative work that has been largely ignored by mainstream literary history. My ultimate goal is to critically reposition Gerard as a pioneering architect of the late-Victorian feminist gothic.

Part of this doctoral study will include a book length creative piece exploring the writing lives of women.