I have just graduated from Leeds University with a first class honours in English Literature. Alongside this, I was an editor for the university's arts and culture zine, The Scribe. In the last four months I created a series of Covideo diaries with my housemate documenting the experience finishing our degrees in the midst of lockdown. My final year... Read More

I have just graduated from Leeds University with a first class honours in English Literature. Alongside this, I was an editor for the university's arts and culture zine, The Scribe. In the last four months I created a series of Covideo diaries with my housemate documenting the experience finishing our degrees in the midst of lockdown. My final year project was looking at Wilkie Collins's representation of 'disabled' in three of his novels. For this dissertation I carried out extensive research into the history of the language surrounding impairment. This project also honed my skills of close reading and analysis to argue that Collins was both indulgent and progressive in his depiction of disability. Researching archives to understand the history of disability enabled me to look at how language which categorised people with disabilities into one group fed into the binary of 'self' and 'other'. I argued that this shift in language fed into the thinking behind eugenics which was predominant in the ensuing twentieth century. Read Less