Dr Nicky Hallett
Senior Lecturer
Room 1.25, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Internal extension: 28472
Phone number: +44 (0)114-222-8472
Fax: +44 (0)114-222-8481
email : N.A.Hallett@sheffield.ac.uk
I joined the School of English in 2007, having worked immediately before that for several years at the University of Kent where I co-founded, with Jan Montefiore, a Centre for Gender, Sexuality & Writing.
My research interests are broadly in those subject areas, particularly as they relate to women´s self-writing and auto/biography, from around the later fourteenth century through to the contemporary period. Publications in this field include:
Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/biography in the Twentieth Century (London & Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 1999)
My interest in the History of the Book has lately been re-animated by an act of vandalism towards my own work, the response to which formed part of an art exhibition in San Francisco:
These inherently interdisciplinary interests originated in doctoral study at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York on Social Ostentation in the Art and Literature of Fifteenth Century England. Here I explored relationships between style, subjectivity and `conspicuous cultural consumption´, particularly in pious production of the later medieval period (poetry, visual and manuscript art, funerary monuments). This work led me to a wider interest in self-construction within fiction and non-fiction of later periods and hence to my research in auto/biography.
Most recently, initially supported by AHRB funding, I have been looking at the life-writing of early modern nuns. This has opened up what I hope will be major new sources of information on women´s lives in the period between c.1619 and 1794. I´ve published an edition of previously unknown material produced by English religious women living in exile in the Low Countries:
Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Ashgate: Burlington, VA & Aldershot, 2007)
and a study of witchcraft and exorcism in a case involving two of the nuns:
Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was once bewiched and Sister Margaret twice’(Ashgate: Burlington, VA & Aldershot, 2007)
I´m interested, too, in the relationship between the self (my self) and the process of research, the effect of the observer on both the object and the subject of enquiry. Work in this area has been presented at a number of international conferences.
Since arriving at Sheffield, I´ve launched a joint colloquium series with Jan Montefiore, the Sheffield/Kent seminars in Gender, Sexuality & Writing, based at the Humanities Research Institute. With Frances Harris, Head of Modern (post-1603) Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, I co-supervise a PhD student in receipt of a University of Sheffield/British Library studentship, working on the papers of Winefrid Thimelby, an Augustinian nun, her letters and Catholic life-writing. I am also part of an academic advisory group for the wonderful AHRC-funded project `Who Were the Nuns?´ led by Caroline Bowden at Queen Mary, University of London:
Further Selected Publications:
`Paradise Postponed: the Nationhood of Nuns in the 1670s´ in Religion, Culture and the National Community in the 1670s, ed. Tony Claydon and Tom Corns (University of Wales Press, 2010)
`Anne Clifford as Orlando: Virginia Woolf´s feminist historiology and women´s biography´, Women´s History Review, 4,4, 1995, 505–24; reprinted in Mihoko Suzuki, ed., Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1500-1700: Vol. 5: Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson (Burlington VT & Aldershot, 2009)
`Chaucer´s Women: "fayre wordes brake neuer bone" `, in A Companion to Chaucer, ed Peter Brown (Blackwell: Oxford & Malden, MA, 2000, rep. 2002), 480 – 94
`Did Mrs Danvers Warm Rebecca´s Pearls? Significant Exchanges and the Extension of Lesbian Space and Time in Literature´, Feminist Review, 74 (Summer 2003)
` "Anxiously Yours": the epistolary self and the culture of concern´, Journal of European Studies, 32: 2 & 3 (June/ September 2002) – a special double-edition of the Journal, co-edited with Jan Montefiore
` " as if it had nothing belonged to her": the Lives of Catherine Burton (1668 - 1714) as a Discourse on Method in Early Modern Life-Writing´, Early Modern Literary Studies, 7:3 (2002)
I would be happy to work with students interested in late medieval and early modern literary culture; in contemporary women´s self-writing; spiritual autobiography; in any field of self-writing, auto/biography, feminist or Queer theory.
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