Dr Natasha Periyan

About

My research considers the relationship between education and literature, with a focus on how writers’ educational work informs their class, cultural and gender politics, and the development of their aesthetics. My book, The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender (Bloomsbury, 2018) argues that education was a significant means through which 1930s writers engaged with shifting democratic forms in the interwar period. It considers a wide range of writers, including W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Stephen Spender, Antonia White, Henry Green, Walter Greenwood, Graham Greene and George Orwell. I also have particular research interests on Virginia Woolf, and I have published on Woolf’s politics in relation to her educational involvements.

​My current research falls into two main areas: the first considers the politics and style of interwar women writers, and the second will expand my previous research interests to consider the significance of the relationship between educational reform and the sciences of the mind for the emergence of modernism. Prior to my position at Kent, I taught at Goldsmiths, Falmouth and Royal Holloway.