Shona Whelan, Newnham

Biographical Information

I was an undergraduate at Homerton College, graduating with a double Starred First and several academic awards, including the Mrs Claude Beddington Prize. I remained at Homerton for my MPhil (Distinction), which was funded by a Baillie Gifford Cambridge Masters Studentship. My PhD is generously funded by an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP – Newnham College Studentship.

Research Interests

My research brings the prose works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays and Mary Robinson into dialogue with contemporary feminist care ethics. Drawing on the philosophy of Nel Noddings in particular, it argues that the central principles of care ethics – emphasising the importance of relationality, an attentive regard for the other and the moral and evaluative capacities of the emotions – can enrich our understanding of the ethical potential of these authors’ novels. By placing these writers’ novels alongside their pedagogical and polemical writings, this work aims to reconsider the significance of affective engagement in the Revolutionary period’s debates on women’s educational, social and political rights.

I would be delighted to supervise for Part I Paper 1, Part I Paper 6, Part I Paper 7A, Part II Paper 1 and Part II Paper 9. I would also be keen to supervise any dissertations on any aspect of women’s writing in the long eighteenth century. Outside of this period, I am also interested in nineteenth century women’s writing, modernist women’s writing and feminist approaches to affect theory, histories and philosophies of the emotions and many branches of feminist and relational philosophy, and I would be very happy to supervise work in these areas.