Contact
Biography
Before joining the Foundation Arts team in 2019, Sasha taught History at the University of Sheffield and English Literature at the University of Nottingham, and studied at University College London and Keble College Oxford. On Foundation Arts, she will be teaching Language and Culture, Media and Visual Culture, and the Project. In English, she teaches the early modern period, the Restoration, the Gothic, and Literature & Popular Culture.
An interdisciplinary scholar with an English Literature background and social history expertise, Sasha researches gender, sex and food as a nexus of cultural anxieties, from the early modern period to the present day. Her new book, Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation, examines female food refusal during the early modern period, its literary representations, and its precise differentiation from the modern phenomenon of eating disorders. It represents the first interdisciplinary study of its kind. Currently, her ongoing research projects include the food behaviour of women in asylums in the nineteenth century; gender, embodiment, and sexuality in Edwardian school fiction; the Earl of Rochester; and the language of gender and power in early modern bastardy trials.
Expertise Summary
Teaching: Academic communication; British history from 1500 to the present, especially women's and queer history; early modern English Literature, especially Renaissance drama, women's writing, Behn and Rochester; eighteenth and nineteenth century literature; literature and popular culture; the Gothic. Across the teaching spectrum Sasha is particularly interested in equality and diversity, access to the academy, and widening participation.
Research: Gender, sexuality and food in culture; bodies and the physical in early modern culture; self-starvation and food behaviour; the social history of gender, sexuality and embodiment from the early modern period to the present; early modern women's letters; madness and sanity; women's writing; commonplace and receipt books; asylum culture; early modern drama; the Gothic; Restoration literature; gender, authority and transgression; gender and sexuality in Edwardian school fiction.
Books - in Print
Early Modern English Noblewomen and self-starvation: 'The skull beneath the skin' (Routledge, 2019).
Chapters - in Print
• 'Watching Elizabeth Eating: power and the politics of penetration' in Suzanne Scholz, Daniel Dornhofer, eds, Spectatorship at the Elizabethan Court (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt, 2013) pp.22-45.
• 'Katherine Grey', 'Jane Lumley', 'Margaret Radcliffe', in Carole Levin, Anna Riehl Bertolet, Jo Eldridge Carney, eds, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500-1650 (Ashgate, November 2016), pp. 111, 267, 584.
• 'Microserfs' in Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Writers and their Work, Geoff Hamilton, Brain Jones, eds (New York, Facts on File, 2010), 267-269.
Refereed Journals - Articles
'"The skull beneath the skin": Women and Self-Starvation on the Renaissance Stage' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 145/2009) pp.106-123.
'Katie Green' and 'Neil Gaiman' in Meg John Barker, Joseph de Lappe, Caroline Walters, eds., 'Mental Health in Comics', special issue of Asylum, 22(1 -4), 2015.
• 'Fisting and feasting, or metamorphosis by the mouthful: food, sex, power and the female body in the erotic fiction of Pat Califia' in STET (journal published by Kings College London), June 2012.
'Entering Elizabeth' in Assuming Gender (online journal published by the University of Cardiff), Vol 1, Issue 1, Spring 2010.
'Daughters, Defiance and Death: Jane Lumley and Euripides's 'Iphigenia,'" in genre: Women, Sexuality, and Early Modern Studies, CSULB, vol 28, 2008, pp.109-125.
Reviews
• Review of A Woman Killed With Kindness (directed by Katie Mitchell for the National Theatre) in Shakespeare, Vol 8, Issue 1, April 2012, pp. 92-95.
• Review of Joan Fitzpatrick's Shakespeare and the Language of Food in Times Literary Supplement, 24th March 2011.
• 'What's a play without a woman in it?': review of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (directed by Mitchell Moreno for Doublethink) at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney, October 2009) in Shakespeare, Vol 6, Issue 2, June 2010, pp.267-270.
• 'The Trouble With Jane', review of Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, in Times Literary Supplement , May 22nd 2009, p.10.
• 'Owain and Catherine', review of Vanora Bennet, Blood Royal, in Times Literary Supplement July 3rd 2009, p.21.
• Review of Sarah Dunant's Sacred Heart in Times Literary Supplement, August 7th 2009, p.25.
• Review of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (directed by Melly Still) at the National Theatre, London, 2008, in Shakespeare, Vol 4, Issue 4, Dec. 2008, pp.425 - 428.
• Review of Thomas Dekker and John Webster's Westward Ho (directed by Andrea Kantor for Paper and String) at the White Bear Theatre Club, London, April 2008, in Shakespeare, Vol 4, Issue 3, Sept. 2008, pp.332-335.