My PhD project, 'Developing Minds in Modernist Fiction', explores how cognitive/4E theories of cognition and insight from phenomenology and developmental psychology can enhance our understanding of fictional children and the kinds of reading experiences they afford adult readers. The literary corpus includes Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1898), Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and a selection of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories (1912–1921). I examine how authors model developmental patterns that are at once consistent with contemporary science but also grounded in historical and cultural constructions of childhood. The thesis argues that literary works evoke children's experiences in ways that invite readers to simulate 'what it is like' to be a child, but without necessarily losing awareness of the child's fictional status and social construction.
Academic interests
Children and childhood in literature; British literature, history and culture; Modernism; narratology; cognitive literary studies; literature and science; Harlem Renaissance literature.
Background
- 2020–2021: Research assistant at the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE), University of Oslo.
- 2017: MA in Comparative Literature, University of Oslo.
- 2015: BA(Hons) in English, Falmouth University, UK.