Shelley Trower

Shelley Trower works in the English and Creative Writing department at the University of Roehampton.

Since 2004 she has taught in literature departments at Birkbeck and the Universities of Westminster, Northampton, Plymouth, and Hull. She has also worked in the field of oral history from 2006 onwards, and became a Researcher for the AHRC-funded project Mysticism, Myth, and ‘Celtic’ Nationalism at the University of Exeter (2008-2011), before starting at Roehampton in 2012. Research interests span nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, along with oral history.

Publications include Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (2011), Senses of Vibration (2012, shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science book award), and Rocks of Nation (2015, shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English book award), along with co-edited collections, chapters and articles. Click here for her academic homepage.

Her own memories of fiction are limited mainly to Enid Blyton books, Stories for Seven Year Olds, and The Beano in childhood, and Stephen King and Geoff Ryman in adolescence and young adulthood. Since starting as a mature student for her BA in English Studies at Bath Spa in 1996, her reading has ranged from The Iliad to Victorian and Gothic and Modernist novels, science fiction, romances, and memoirs. Her remarkable capacity to forget means she has had to re-read many novels repeatedly – including Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, and Heart of Darkness – in order to teach them.