Sasha Garwood

Biography

An interdisciplinary scholar with an English Literature background and social history expertise, I focus on gender, sex and food as a nexus of cultural anxieties from the early modern period to the present day. My new book, Early Modern English Noble Women 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, my 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. I studied at Keble College Oxford and University College London, and currently teach History at the University of Sheffield and English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

Education

PhD, University College London, 2013
MSt, Keble College Oxford, 2007
BA (Hons), University College London, 2006

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Gender, sexuality and food in culture; bodies and the physical in early modern culture; medical and religious perspectives on 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; Restoration literature; gender, authority and transgression; gender and sexuality in Edwardian school fiction.

Books

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