Dr Lynda Prescott

Head of Department and Senior Lecturer

I have been associated with the Open University since 1977 when I enrolled as a student on an education course after taking my first degree at the University of Nottingham. I subsequently became a part-time postgraduate student at the OU: my doctoral thesis was on fiction and history in the work of V.S.Naipaul.

Teaching

Before joining the Open University as a staff tutor in English, I taught at the universities of Nottingham and Bradford. Through working on a number of literature and interdisciplinary modules at the Open University, I have developed a particular interest in distance learning and teaching, including e-learning. I have written materials for OU modules on Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (2000), The Nineteenth-Century Novel (2001), Twentieth-Century Literature: Texts and Debates (2005), The Arts Past and Present (2008) and Voices and Texts (2010), for which I am the module team chair.

Research

My main areas of interest are: nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, and the relationship between fictional and nonfictional narratives. Recent doctoral supervision includes theses on Thomas Hardy, Lionel Britton, Louis MacNeice and J.G.Farrell.

Publications include:

(as editor) A World of Difference – An Anthology of Short Stories from Five Continents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

‘Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel’ in Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-national Dimension in Print Culture, ed. Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

‘Pat Barker’s Vanishing Boundaries’ in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley, (Routledge, 2005)

I have also published articles in a wide range of scholarly journals, including Studies in Continuing Education, Life-Writing, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Irish Studies Review and Wasafiri.

Recent conference contributions:

‘Narrative voices in the mid-Victorian melting-pot’, at a conference on Teaching Narrative and Teaching through Narrative (Nordic Network of Narrative Studies), University of Tampere, Finland (2011)

‘Hard facts, soft words, and questions of genre’, at a conference on Representing Lives and Learning (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults – Life History and Biography Network), Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden (2010)

Co-organiser of Literature and Liberation, a conference in celebration of the work of Graham Martin (the Open University and the Raymond Williams Society), Institute of English Studies, London (2007)

See also Open Research Online for further details of Lynda Prescott’s research publications.