Julyan Oldham

Thesis title: Virginity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth-Century British Novel: Fictions of Incompleteness

Supervisor: Rebecca Beasley

Research interests: twentieth-century literature and culture; literary modernism; queer and gender studies; the history of sexuality; national identity; temporality; sentimentality; the novel and narrative

Doctoral Research: My AHRC-funded DPhil research examines virginity as a way of reframing discussions of (anti)sentimentality, time, Englishness, and spirituality in the early twentieth-century British novel. Writers under consideration in this project include (but are not limited to) Mary Butts, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Hope Mirrlees, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf.

Teaching: I have worked with undergraduates and visiting students on a range of modern and contemporary authors and subjects, from twentieth-century asexuality to the history of the novel form.

Publications

'Growing Absurd: Sexuality, Development, and Virgin Time in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage.' Studies in the Novel 55:4 (Winter 2023, special issue on 'Strange Temporalities')

'"Preserved Through Childbirth": Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway's Virginity.' Journal of Modern Literature, forthcoming