India Oswin, Trinity

Biographical Information

Originally from Brisbane, Australia, I am a current PhD researcher based in the Faculty of English. I took a BA in English Literature and Art History at the University of Queensland, where I graduated with first-class honours and a university medal for my dissertation on forms of 'rhizomatic' subjectivity in the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield. I then came to Cambridge for an MPhil in English Studies, generously funded by Trinity College’s Gould Studentship in English Literature, on Djuna Barnes’s morbid reinscription of Spinozan ethics. I am now in the first year of my PhD, jointly funded by the Cambridge Trust and Cambridge Australia Scholarships, where I am researching a thesis on women and concrete poetry in Britain.

Research Interests

My research centres broadly on women’s contributions to anglophone modernism (and its afterlives) in its various literary, artistic, and philosophical permutations. My current work examines the place of women’s writing and artistic endeavours in the broader context of Britain’s concrete poetry movement from the 1960s through until roughly 1980. Key writers and artists include Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Paula Claire, Jennifer Pike Cobbing, Lily Greenham, Geraldine Monk, Maggie O’Sullivan, and Betty Radin. Beyond my PhD, I maintain an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary women’s avant-garde writing more generally, feminist and queer theory, theories of affect and embodiment, experimental poetics, and the intersections between textual and visual culture.