I became a member of the OU English Department in 2000. Before that I lectured at Queen Mary College, University of London, where I completed all of my own post-graduate research.
I am currently Deputy Chair of A230 Reading and Studying Literature, the English Department's new level 2 English module. As one of the production team I wrote on Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, poets living and writing in New York in the 1920s and 30s, for the 'Cities' part of the Twentieth Century book which I edited with my colleague Sara Haslam. I contributed chapters on the American writer Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening for AA316 The Nineteenth Century Novel, and the American poets Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg for A300 Debating Twentieth Century Literature.
My PhD was on readers and so-called experimental texts; the main focus was the Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). My interest in ways reader engage with fictional texts led to related work on detective fiction, while the Irish connection remains an abiding interest.
While I was working on entries for The Feminist Companion to Literatures in English in the late 1980s, I came across Margiad Evans’s fiction. More recently I have worked on her unpublished writing and bought out a new edition of her autobiographical novel, The Wooden Doctor (first published in 1933). Evans’s writing has generated my interest in biography, autobiography and illness narratives. The following link will take you to a paper about Evans’s unpublished ms The Nightingale Silenced, her account of the acute stage of her illness from an inoperable brain tumour, which I gave at an interdisciplinary conference on The Patient which took place in Salzburg in 2008. “To Write a Great Story”: Margiad Evans’ Illness Narratives in The Patient: Probing the Inter-Disciplinary Boundaries edited by Aleksandra Bartoszko and Maria Vaccarella. Read the eBook (PDF, 1.13 MB)Follow this link for details of selected publications
Email: sue.asbee@open.ac.uk
