Sylvia Morgan
Sylvia Morgan
Sylvia Morgan is a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, and Pretoria, and in 2001 acquired an M.Ed in IT while on a Fulbright Scholarship to Columbia University. She lived most of her life in Cape Town, and some of it in Berlin, Johannesburg, New York, and San Francisco, and in 2003 arrived in another great iconic city - Glasgow. She has worked as a teacher, university lecturer, and instructional designer, and currently has a day job as a university bureaucrat while writing up an M.Phil in Scottish Studies part-time.
Her current research draws on nothing she has done before but is increasing her knowledge and respect, if not necessarily understanding, of Glasgow. The dissertation title is 'The crisis of capitalism in interwar Glasgow and its realistic representation', and argues that the 1920's and 30's were a defining moment in the economy and culture of Glasgow and in the narrative of the city. Contemporary socio-economic conditions produced a particular form of literary representation of Glasgow, creating a new genre of urban social realism in Scottish literature: what became known as `the realistic novels of Clydeside`. The dissertation takes a new historicist approach, asking questions about the relationships of power suggested by the texts; and about the ideologies, institutions, political, economic, social and aesthetic concerns at the time when Glasgow, the once powerful industrial Second City of Empire, was transforming into the antecedent of its current post-industrial identity. Supervisors - Gerry Carruthers (Scot Lit) and Irene Maver (Scot Hist).
Recent Conference Papers
'The crisis of capitalism in interwar Glasgow and its realistic representation', Historical Perspectives 'Work in Progress' seminar series, University of Glasgow 2007
'Land here and there: Removal, resistance and the rhetoric of reconstruction', Lie of the Land Conference, Stirling Univ 2006
'Semi-Subaltern or Servitor Imperialist: The Scots as colonised or coloniser', Cultural Spaces Conference, London Univ 2006