Claudia Cornelissen, St John's

Biographical Information

I read English at St John's College, Cambridge as an undergraduate, before studying for a MSc in Gender (distinction) at the LSE. I also obtained an MA in Western Literature (summa cum laude) at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2021 I returned to St John's College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar to study for the PhD in English. 

I was the faculty's PhD student rep for 2023, and I am a co-founder and 2023-4 convenor of the Ambivalent Archives Research Network at CRASSH.

 

Research Interests

My research consists of a genealogical enquiry into feminist revisionism, the mode in which authors rewrite canonical stories to centralise female voice and subjectivity. By tracing feminist revisionism's history, placing it in its cultural and feminist-theoretical context, and studying how the mode has previously been conceptualised, I consider its epistemological potential and limitations, as well as the wider implications of revisionism becoming one of the most visible 'feminist' literatures of our time. 

Some of the authors my thesis considers are Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Augusta Webster, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Jean Rhys, Fran Ross, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, and Pat Barker. 

My wider research interests include cultural memory studies, feminist literature and theory, and classical reception studies. Authors I've worked on include Euripides, Ovid, E.M. Forster, Tan Twan Eng, and Saidiya Hartman. 

 

Selected Publications

Conference papers:

'Feminist Revisionist Literature: Making it New, Again', NeMLA, March 2024

'“A new song”? The problem of novelty in feminist revisionist literature, Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar, October 2023

'Feminist Revisionist Literature and the Limits of Political Reading', Gates Cambridge Day of Research, May 2023

'The Telling of Violence, and the Violence of the Telling: The Inscription of Memory in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists', ACLA Annual Meeting, June 2022 

'"If the inner life were the whole of life": E. M. Forster’s Critique of Social Philosophies in Howards End', MDRN Research Lab Seminar, KU Leuven, June 2021

'Reconsidering Canonical Silences', Faculty of Arts Graduate Research Conference, KU Leuven, December 2020

'Hearing the Subaltern in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things', Post/Coloniality and Development Workshop, LSE, December 2019

Publications:

'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, an edited collection to be published by Routledge in 2024