Harriet Stilley

Biography

Dr Harriet Stilley currently holds a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute. Harriet received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, where she has since been working as a teacher of English and American literature. Her main areas of teaching and research expertise lie in modern and contemporary American fiction, and specifically within masculinity studies.
Harriet’s work has featured in a variety of American, British, and European Journals, including the Cormac McCarthy Journal, the Journal of American Studies, and the European Journal of American Studies; and her first monograph (From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977) was published in late 2018 as part of Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. Harriet is at present working on her second monograph, which will deliver an innovative examination of masculinity in contemporary Asian American crime fiction.

Education

MA (Joint Hons), MSc (Distinction), PhD

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Harriet’s research focuses on gender, race, and diversity in late twentieth-century American fiction. Specifically, she is interested in the various ways post-war American authors engage with the tension between late capitalist consumer culture and traditional national conceptions of American manhood. Harriet's first monograph entitled, From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, published as part of Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature, is a politically sophisticated study of the cultural production of American masculinities in a time of social and political turbulence and rapid change. The book offers a fresh perspective on the development of masculinities in the American 1970s, and the post-Sixties, post-Vietnam, and ultimately post-Fordist shocks that the United States experienced during that decade. In it she employs a number of prolific contemporary American writers, including John Cheever, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Michael Herr, together with an investigation into hypermasculine male violence, the classical and grotesque body, serial killer mythology, and specific regional themes such as the Western frontier, the American Adam, the Southern Gothic and the Suburban Gothic. Her wider research interests include twentieth-century feminist and Marxist theory, critiques of postmodernity and late capitalist commodity culture, as well as studies of American history and mythology.

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Books

Articles