Dr Megan Girdwood

Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow

Biography

Background

Megan is originally from Renfrewshire, near Glasgow, and she studied English at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her BA in 2013 and an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature in 2014. She then moved to the University of York to pursue a PhD (2014-2018), which was funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. While at York, she presented her work at a range of conferences across the UK and Europe, and taught on undergraduate courses including 'Victorian Literature', 'Approaches to Literature: Writing Modernity', and 'Critical Practice'. In January 2019, she joined the University of Edinburgh as an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow.

Undergraduate teaching

  • English Literature 1 (pre-Hons tutorials)
  • English Literature 2 (pre-Hons tutorials)
  • Edinburgh in Fiction/ Fiction in Edinburgh (3rd year Honours Option)
  • Global Modernisms: Inter/national Responses to Modernity (4th year Honours Core Period Course)
  • Fin de Siècle into Modern (4th year Honours Option)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Global Modernisms: Inter/national Responses to Modernity (PG version)
  • MSc Dissertation Supervision

Research summary

Megan's research is broadly focused on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, especially as it relates to modernism and the avant-garde. She is particularly interested in the relationship between modernist texts and other art forms, and she is currently preparing her first monograph, titled 'Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome's Dance after 1890' (Edinburgh University Press), which will explore interdisciplinary reinventions of the figure of Salome in literature, dance, theatre, and film after the fin de siècle. Examining both the practical and imaginative exchanges that occured between literature and dance during this period, this project will show how Salome became the controversial focus of modernism's choreographic impulses, facilitating transformative encounters between 'major' authors and less well-known dancers, filmmakers, and performers. More widely, her research and teaching interests include literature and the body; feminist and queer writing; Decadence, Symbolism, and other 19th century aesthetic movements; theories of the visual and phenomenology; adaptation; and contemporary British fiction.

Megan has published and forthcoming articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Irish Studies Review, the Cambridge Quarterly, and the Journal of Religion & Film, and she will co-edit a special issue of the Journal of War & Culture Studies on 'Global Perspectives on the Body and World War II,' forthcoming in 2020. 

View all 12 publications on Research Explorer

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