Postgraduate research students

“Narrating grief: trauma and the disruption of time and form”

My research is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationships between narrative, time, and trauma: primarily, it’s a practice-based exploration of the impact of bereavement by suicide on narrative time, examining how it transforms temporal experience within fictional and non-fictional narratives. I am aiming to create new ways of representing the disruptive temporal aspect of grief, and develop a theoretical approach for understanding its potential effect on narrative structure and time.

Primary research strands:

- Fiction project: representations of bereavement by suicide and the ethical and philosophical problems suicide poses to fiction writing, through the writing of a novel

- Creative non-fiction project: experimental essays on how bereavement by suicide disrupts existing narratives of self and selfhood, speaking across the creative-critical boundary and tracking the lived experience research process from an autoethnographic perspective

- Narratological enquiry: academic essay on how grief functions as a disruptive narrative device within contemporary Scottish novelist and essayist Ali Smith’s writings

List by: Type | Date

• Dr Carolyn Jess-Cooke
• Professor Zoe Strachan

• SGSAH AHRC DTP Scholarship 2020-2024 
• Graduate Student International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference award 2021

• "something from something: erasure poetry, writing trauma, and creative practice as research", University of Glasgow College of Arts Postgraduate Conference, June 2021
• "Traumatic grief as a disruptive narrative device", International Conference on Narrative, May 2021
• "Grief made visible: experiments in narrative form through creative practice", Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research 4th Annual Congress, April 2021

Semester 1

• GTA 1A Poetry and Poetics

Semester 2

• CW Experimental writing: time, space and form

• Member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative 2021-2023
• Co-editor of From Glasgow to Saturn 2020-2021
• Novel-in-progress ORDINARY MIRACLES shortlisted for the North Lit Agency Prize 2021