Violet Hatch, Lucy Cavendish

Biographical Information

Before coming to Cambridge, I studied for a BA in English and Related literature at the University of York and an MA in Modern and Contemporary literature at UCL.

Research Interests

My PhD explores how writers navigate topics of death, loss and post-war trauma through the imaginative retrieval of the lost sounds of modernist radio drama at the BBC 1924-41. This area of research needs further attention paid to it due to the over fixation on recorded voices in existing scholarship which fails to acknowledge the value of unrecorded voices. Focusing on material scripts without their sonic counterparts allows me to engage in critical analysis through a kind of imaginative retrieval of what lost sounds can do, as opposed to a solely historical approach from listening to old recordings. In this way, I will be able to treat material scripts of radio dramas as valuable literary artefacts. I wish to suggest that scripts unaccompanied by sound, allow readers to experience their imaginative potential without a predisposed bias towards voices and sounds, whilst not divorcing them from their sonic properties completely.

My areas of interest for supervisions include the modernist novel, modernist poetry, modernism and technology, literature and radio and literature and sound. Specific writers of interest include (but are not limited to) Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Elisabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, E.M Forster, Jean Rhys and James Joyce.