Claudia Cornelissen, St John's

Biographical Information

I studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge, before completing an MSc in Gender (with distinction) at the London School of Economics and an MA in Western Literature (summa cum laude) at KU Leuven. In 2021, I returned to St John’s as a Gates Cambridge Scholar to undertake a PhD in English.

I served as the English Faculty’s PhD student representative in 2023 and am a co-founder of the Ambivalent Archives Research Network at CRASSH. I have held research fellowships at Chawton House and Queen Mary, University of London.

As a first-generation university student, I am committed to widening access to higher education and have worked in outreach with St John’s College, the Faculty of English, and various charitable organisations for more than a decade. I welcome enquiries from prospective students, particularly those who have encountered barriers to higher education.

Research Interests

My research examines the relationship between literary revision, political thought, and the construction of literary authority. My doctoral thesis, The Feminist Revisionist Mode: Politics, Literary Authority, and the Marketplace, 1677-Present, argues that women writers have revised canonical and male-authored texts for explicitly political purposes since the emergence of professional female authorship. It theorises this literature as a transhistorical and transgeneric literary mode, and traces its changing operations and political stakes through case studies that consider works by Aphra Behn, Charlotte Lennox, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Augusta Webster, and Jean Rhys. The thesis also examines the mode’s contemporary recuperation as a marketable genre of female-centred retellings, in which the declaration of feminist politics can displace substantive political critique.

My wider research interests include feminist literary history and theory, literary reception, cultural memory, the history of the book, and the politics of the literary marketplace. I am available for undergraduate teaching in English literature from 1660 to the present, practical criticism, and tragedy, as well as undergraduate and MPhil dissertations on women’s writing, literary theory, gender and sexuality, adaptation, classical reception, or contemporary literature. 

 

Selected Publications

• Classicism, Literary Authority, and Black Artistic Community in Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral’, The Review of English Studies. In press; forthcoming 2026
• ‘The Telling of Violence, and the Violence of the Telling: Narrative and the Choice to Forget in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists’ in Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World, ed. by Yiru Lim and Kit Ying Lye (New York: Routledge, 2024), pp. 107-117

Selected conferences and presentations: 

• CRASSH Workshop: What is Influence? (Cambridge, UK). Provocation: When Influence Won’t Do: The Politics of Revision (2026)
• NeMLA Convention (Boston, USA). Feminist Revisionist Literature: Making it New, Again (2024)
• University of Cambridge, Classical Reception Seminar (Cambridge, UK, and online). The Problem of Novelty in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2023)
• ACLA Annual Meeting (Taipei, Taiwan, and online). The Inscription of Memory in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2022)
• KU Leuven MDRN Research Lab (Leuven, Belgium, and online). ‘If the inner life were the whole of life’: E. M. Forster’s Critique of Social Philosophies in Howards End (2021)
• LSE Gender, Post/Coloniality and Development Workshop (London, UK). Considering the Subaltern: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2019)

Selected public engagement: 

• Presenter, ‘Reading Women’s Writing’, Chawton House (forthcoming, August 2026)
• Co-organiser, ‘Classics Beyond the Canon: A Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon’, University of Cambridge (2025)
• Presenter, Cambridge Festival, University of Cambridge. ‘“What’s Hecuba to us?”: Mythological Revisionism Through the Ages’ (2024)
• Presenter, Gates Day of Research, University of Cambridge. ‘Feminist Revisionist Literature: The Limits of Political Reading’ (2023)