BA, PhD (Birmingham)

Senior Lecturer

Chair of the MA in Modern Literature

Contact Details:

• E: ep27@leicester.ac.uk

• T: +44 (0)116 252 2630

Research Interests

Dr Parker specialises in post-war British literature and contemporary fiction, particularly women's writing, and her research focuses on issues relating to gender and sexuality. She has published a book on Kate Atkinson as well as essays on Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Michèle Roberts, Rose Tremain, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, and Will Self. She has interviewed Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, and Valerie Mason-John. Topics covered in her work include food, romance, trauma, diaspora, magic, masculinity, transsexuality, and male pregnancy. She is editor of Contemporary British Women Writers (2004), has guest edited special issues of Contemporary Women's Writing (2009) and Textual Practice (2011), and is co-editor, with Mary Eagleton, of volume 10 of The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present (forthcoming Palgrave, 2014). She is a founder member of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and Associate Editor of  the journal Contemporary Women's Writing, published by Oxford University Press and winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals' 'Best New Journal' award 2009.

Current Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Parker has supervised or is supervising PhD dissertations on queer South Asian fiction, Sarah Waters, revisionary representations of Biblical women in contemporary women's writing,  Margaret Walker, cyborgs in American science fiction, the single woman in the 1950s, and short fiction by contemporary women writers.  She welcomes applications from students wishing to work in the following areas:

• contemporary women's writing
• contemporary British fiction
• queer fiction
• masculinity
• the 1980s

Teaching and Administration

Emma Parker was awarded a Teaching Fellowship (a University prize for excellence in teaching) in 2003.

Undergraduate

• EN3040 (Convenor) Post War to Postmodern: Literature 1945 - Present Day
• EN3102 (Convenor) Contemporary Women's Writing
• EN3144 (Convenor) The Thatcher Factor: Literary Representations of the 1980s

Postgraduate

• MA in Modern Literature: EN7134 Literature and Gender: Deviant Bodies and Dissident Desires 
• MA in Humanities: 'Gender and Literature'.
• MA in The Country House: 'Contemporary Gothic'.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

'The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger' in Kaye Mitchell ed. Sarah Waters (forthcoming Continuum, January 2013).

'Queers, Gals, Chaps, Chicks, and Lads' in The Oxford History of the Novel, Vol. 7, British and Irish Fiction Since 1940, eds. Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (forthcoming Oxford University Press, 2013).

'Kicks Against the Pricks: Gender, Sex, and Satire in Will Self's Cock and Bull', English vol. 60, no. 230 (Autumn 2011): 229-250.

'Magic, Diaspora and Klezbian Desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist', Textual Practice 25. 4 (August 2011): 689-710.

Full list of publications