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Sue Walsh

Sue Walsh portrait

Joint School Lead for Diversity and Inclusion

Academic Disability Representative for the Department of English Literature

Teaching

I convene the 2nd year module on C19th American Literature called 'Writing America: Perspectives on the Nation' and a 3rd year module on Nigerian Literature in English.

I also convene ‘Global Children’s Literatures in English’ for the MRes in Children’s Literature

I supervise undergraduate dissertation students working on a range of subjects such as: pre- and post-Darwinian Children's Fiction about animals (making use of the Special Collections in Children's literature held at Reading), African Literature (often making use of the publishers’ archives of the African Writers Series), American Literature (particularly literature about nature and/or the wilderness).

I contribute to the following modules:

  • Changing Identities (foundation level)
  • Environmental Humanities (foundation level)
  • Prose: Writing Identities (undergraduate, part 1)
  • Modern American Culture and Counter-Culture (undergraduate, part 1)
  • The Business of Books (undergraduate, part 2)
  • Contemporary Fiction (undergraduate, part 2)
  • Modernism and Modern Poetry (undergraduate, part 2)
  • Children's Literature (Undergraduate, part 3)
  • Publishing and the Business of Books (MA in English)
  • Contemporary Literature and Ethnicity (MA in English)
  • Popular Forms (MRes in Children's Literature)
  • Children's Radio, Television and Film (MRes in Children's Literature)
  • Nineteenth Century Children's Literature (MRes in Children's Literature)

I supervise MA dissertation students working on an equally diverse range of topics for the MRes in Children's Literature, for example: 'Ideas of Writing in the Work of Children's Fantasy Writer Diana Wynne Jones', 'Ideas of agency and authority in The Brownies' Book' (which was the first periodical specifically for African-American children edited by W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1920s), and a dissertation on ideas about teenage sexuality as analysed in the debates around Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.

As a member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media, my primary research interests tend to be focused around ideas of childhood.  Currently, I am focusing on the publishers’ archives of the African Writers Series (held here at Reading) and I’m particularly interested in investigating the development of a junior version of this series known as JAWS.  My most recent work has been focused on the Heinemann African Writers Series which I want to bring together with my  interest in ideas about language and narration in children's literature, and I'm especially intrigued by what discussions about the relationship of irony to children's literature reveal about the construction of childhood and contemporary notions of child-appropriate language. I also have wider interests in critical theory and American literature, and I am particularly interested in current debates about ideas of the animal in literature and culture, and would be interested in supervising postgraduate students working in any of these areas.

Research centres and groups

I am a member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media, (CIRCL) and also member of the British Association of American Studies (BAAS), the Children's Literature Association, the African Studies Association and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Research projects

The Junior African Writers Series

This project is a continuation of the research I’ve done most recently on the publishers’ archives for the African Writers Series but aims to allow me to bring together my existing and long-standing expertise in postcolonial children’s literature and my more recent work on the Heinemann archives.  This will involve investigating the uncatalogued HEB material on the Junior AWS alongside working on the manuscripts of the same series that are held at SOAS.

Irony and the Child

This project builds on already published work and concerns the question of irony in children's literature and its use in relation to figurations of childhood. Classically one of the ways of dealing with the presence of irony in children's literature has been to posit the theory of "dual readership", where irony is read as the marker of an adult audience or readership, alongside that of the child. In this is embedded the notion that irony is not appropriate to, or addressed at, the child reader, and my question with respect to this is about the grounds upon which this assumption is made, and what its implications are for ideas about readers and child readers specifically. What too are the implications of not reading irony as indicating an adult readership? If irony disrupts or challenges any notion of language that sees it as simply or straightforwardly meaning what it says, the elimination of irony from texts for children implies a particular conception of the child's relationship to language and it is the implications of this that I wish to address further.

The Hieroglyphic Animal

This project is involved in exploring the implications of what seems an odd and apparently out of place set of references and allusions to hieroglyphs and other ancient Egyptian cultural artifacts in American nature essays and realistic wild animal stories of the 1880s-1910s. These images of ancient Egypt seem to be a residue of the influence of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and of an early to mid-nineteenth century Egyptomania, and they are also appear to be bound up with notions about human-animal kinship, the origins of language and ideas about primitiveness and race. It is these ideas, especially as related to ideas about animal language and the representation of Native Americans, that I want to explore in the animal stories and nature/wilderness writing of authors such as John Muir, John Burroughs, Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, William J. Long and Charles G.D. Roberts.

Selected publications

  • My monograph, Kipling's Children's Literature: Language, Identity and Constructions of Childhood, was published in 2010 by Ashgate. 
  • My most recent article: ‘In pursuit of the “real” Nigeria/n through the archives of Heinemann’s African Writers Series’ in Humanities was published in 2023. 

Publications

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