Staff Profile

I am Associate Dean (Education) in the HaSS Faculty.

I was the Chair of NU Women (2019-2023), the network for women staff and PGRs at Newcastle, and have been on the Steering Committee of the Gender Research Group since its inception in 2009. I have sat on Newcastle University Senate (elected member 2017-2020), Council (elected member 2018-2021), and Court (2021-2024). I have sat on the HASS Promotions Committee, and now sit on the Promotions Appeal Committee. In SELLL, I have recently held the role of Director of Education.

Qualifications

B.A.in Classics (Dalhousie), M.A. in English (Acadia), Ph.D. in English Literature (Exeter). Always very happy to talk to students about heading to Canada for their semester abroad!

Languages

English & French 

Research Interests

My research can be broadly described as engaged with the interplay between gender and genre, particularly in popular culture (thinking about narrative, gender, narratology, emotion, affect, audience) across the long twentieth century.

Current Work

Early twentieth-century British crime fiction; Gertrude Bell and travel; Hadrian’s Wall, archaeology, and literature; tiger skins and desire.

Postgraduate Supervision

I welcome applications from prospective Ph.D. students in the following fields: British crime and detective fiction; sexuality, desire and embodiment; C20 women's writing; feminist history and theory; long C20 British popular culture; cyberpunk studies; and, First World War studies.

I have supervised more than 20 M.Litt students on a range of topics, including: the past in Golden Age detective fiction; video games and gender; time in C20 British and Irish fiction; consent in early C20 American fiction; museums and galleries in early C20 British popular culture; race in early C20 Anglo-American periodicals. 

Current Ph.D. Students

Manujya Ghosh - "The End of the World and Other Mundane Things: The Affect of Climate and Apocalypse Warnings"

Abi Hockaday – “A Woman’s Touch: Gender, Affect and the Computer in Twentieth-Century British Science Fiction Periodicals (1939-1960)” (Funding: Killingley Trust)

Isabel Rolfe – "The Occult and Women Modernist Writers"

Aparna Sivasankar – "Fantasies for the Anthropocene: The Human and Nonhuman in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction from the Global South"

Vaibhav Parel – "The Scene of the Crime: Nationhood and the Postcolonial Contemporary in South Asian Diasporic Crime Fiction" (Funding: AHRC)

Completed Ph.D. Students

2023 - Sarah France, "Before the End: Anticipating and Narrating Extinction in 21st-Century American Fiction” (Funding: AHRC)

2023 - Evie Jeffrey, "'Accessories to Murder: Reading Women's Fashion Objects in Agatha Christie's Detective Fiction" (Funding: Robinson Bequest Bursary)

2022 - Caroline Rae, “Uncanny Water: Entangled Bodies of Water in Fictions of the Northern Atlantic Littoral” (Funding: Killingley Trust; Robinson Bequest Bursary)

2022 - Chiara Pellegrini, "Trans Forms: Gender-Variant Subjectivity and First-Person Narration" (Funding: Killingley Trust)

2021 - Joey Jenkins, "Coming Out of the Woods: Queer Rurality in American Literature, 1967-1997" (Funding: Research Excellence Academy)

2017 - Stephanie Butler, "'Just a Heap of Rubble': Trauma and Home Loss in British Women's Personal Correspondence during the Second World War" (Funding: SSHRCC)

2017 - Anne Carruthers, "The Uterus as Narrative Space in Contemporary Cinema from the America"

2016 - Faye Keegan, “Soft Metafiction(s): Mary Stewart and the Self-Reflective Middlebrow”

2013 - Anne Graefer, “Skin, Celebrity and Cyberpace: Humour and Affect on Gossip Websites”

2013 - Katherine Cooper, “Beyond Borders: War and Nation in the Novels of Storm Jameson, 1937-1961” (Funding: AHRC)

2012 - Emma Short, “No Place Like Home: The Hotel in Modernist Women's Writing” (Funding: AHRC) 

2011 - Lee Barbrook, “Teaching the Conflicts: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle” (Funding: AHRC)

2011 - Katherine Farrimond, “Beyond Backlash: The Femme Fatale in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema” (Funding: AHRC)

2011 - Lucy Gallagher, “The Contemporary Middlebrow Novel: (Post)Feminism, Class and Domesticity” (Funding: AHRC)

2011 - Colleen Robertson, “The Antebellum White Mistress: Culpability and Complexity in American Women's Retrospective Fiction”

2011 - Robin Stoate, “Reading Cyberspace: Fictions, Figures and (Dis)Embodiment” (Funding: AHRC)

2011 - Ellen Turner, “Law, the Domestic and Sovereignty in Interwar Women's Writing” (Funding: AHRC)

2010 - Haifaa al-Hadi, “Sleeping Beauties or Laughing Medusas: Myth and Fairy Tale in the Work of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt and Marina Warner”

2010 - Malcah Effron, “‘If Only This Were a Detective Novel’: Narrative Devices in Twentieth-Century Detective Fiction” 

2009 - Sian Harris, “The Canadian Künstlerroman: The Creative Protagonist in L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence” (Funding: AHRC)

2009 - Maureen Sunderland, “The Long Goodbye: Hard-boiled Interpretations of the City, Femininity, and Masculinity after Chandler” 

Esteem Indicators

• Editorial Collective: Feminist Theory
• Article Reviewer: Journal of Gender Studies, Clio, Contemporary Women's Writing, Women's History Review, Feminist Media Studies, Cultural Politics, Girlhood Studies, Modern Language Review, Mosaic, PMLA, et al.
• Advisory Board: CUP's Elements in Crime 
• Grant Reviewer: SSHRCC; AHRC.
• Manuscript Reviewer: Oxford University Press, Manchester University Press, Liverpool University Press, Sage, Ashgate, I.B. Tauris, et al.
• Ph.D. Examiner: Swansea, Auckland, Goldsmiths, Queen Mary, Goldsmiths, York, Manchester, et al.
• UG Degree Examiner: University of Central Lancashire

External Research Funding & Awards

2015            AHRC Grant: ‘An Essential Part of National Work’: Women and Leisure during the First World War 

2014            Commendation, Barbara Reynolds Award (for work published on Dorothy L. Sayers in the previous decade) for “Consoling Fictions: Mourning, World War One and Dorothy L. Sayers” 

2012            Muriel F. Gold Senior Visiting Scholar, McGill University

2010            Leverhulme Trust: Approaching War: Childhood Culture and the First World War 

2010            AHRC Grant, Gender and Sexuality Studies Beyond the Academy 

2009            Erle Stanley Gardner Fellowship, Harry Ransom Centre

2008            Feminist Review Trust Conference Grant

2007            British Academy Small Research Grant

2007            CRASSH Fellowship, Cambridge University

2007            British Academy Research Grant

2006            British Academy Conference Grant

2006            Royal Historical Society Conference Award

2005            British Academy Overseas Conference Grant

2004-06       SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dalhousie University (declined)

2003            Visiting Scholar, Mount Saint Vincent University

1997-00        Overseas Research Student Fellowship

1998-99        O’Brien Foundation Fellowship

Recent Internal Research Funding

2022      QR ECRF Grant: PREP: Prioritising Research for the ECR Pathway 

2019            EDI Fund for Multitudes: Intersectionalities in HE 

2016          Strategic Impact Generation Development Fund: An Essential Part of National Work’: Women and          Leisure during the First World War 

2015          International Conference Support Scheme and Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal Award for Reading the Wall: The Cultural Afterlives of Hadrian’s Wall

2015       Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal Award: Performances and Connections: Joining Communities through Literature

2015      Catherine Cookson Fund Grant: Performances and Connections: Joining Communities through Literature

2015     Faculty Research Bid Preparation Grant: Digital Reading: Big Data and the DNA of Genre Fiction

I have

I have designed and convened a larger number of modules across all stages of our B.A. and M.A. English Literature degrees. I have also contributed to the Feminisms and to the Cybercultures strands of the Faculty Research Training Programme for postgraduate research students. 

I am currently teaching on SEL3444 Envious Show and SEL3405 Dissertation: Online Exhibition.

Recent Internal Teaching Funding

2023 Education Enhancement Fund: Games Studies Network

2022     Education Development Fund: Student Voice, Student Choice, EDI, the Hidden Curriculum & Making the Transition to University 

2021           Teaching Development Fund: Transforming Transition in SELLL

2021           NUTELA: PGR Supervision and Technology

2021           Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence

2018           Academic Lead, Vacation Undergraduate Scholarship: The Pregnant Male in Popular Fan Culture and Transformative Fiction

2016          Academic Lead, Vacation Undergraduate Scholarship: World War One, Women, and Archives

2015          University Nominee, Times Higher Education National Teaching Awards

2014          Overall Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award, Newcastle Teaching Excellence Awards

2014      University Teaching and Learning Committee Innovation Fund Award

2013          Academic Lead, AHRC Collaborative Skills Development Grant: Women's Work: Research Co-design using the Women’s Institute Archive

2009      University Teaching and Learning Committee Innovation Fund Award

2009          Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence

2008          Academic Lead, Vacation Undergraduate Scholarship: Gender and the Archive

2007      University Teaching and Learning Committee Innovation Fund Award

2006          Faculty Teaching Fellowship

2005      English Subject Centre Project Development Award

• Articles

  • Gillis S. Sin and a Tiger-Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks. Women: a cultural review 2018, 29(2), 216–232.
  • Gillis S. Sin and a Tiger Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks. Women: A Cultural Review 2018, 29(2), 216-232.
  • Gillis S. The Cross-Dresser, the Thief, his Daughter and her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades. Women: A Cultural Review 2015, 26(1-2), 57-74.
  • Gillis S. Pimple’s Three Weeks (Without the Option), with Apologies to Elinor Glyn. Early Popular Visual Culture 2014, 12(3), 378-391.
  • Gillis S. ‘The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh’: The First World War, Corporeality and the Undead in H.D. and Virginia Woolf. Literature & History 2012, 21(1), 24-43.
  • Gillis S. The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk. Gothic Studies 2007, 9(2), 7-19.
  • Gillis S, MacCallum-Stewart E (eds.). Special Issue: Children's Literature and the First World War. Lion and the Unicorn 2007, 31(2).
  • Gillis S, Gates P. Screening L. M. Montgomery: Heritage, Nostalgia and National Identity. British Journal of Canadian Studies 2005, 17(2), 186-196.
  • Gillis S, Munford R. Genealogies and generations: The politics and praxis of third wave feminism. Women's History Review 2004, 13(2), 165-182.

• Authored Books

  • Gillis S, Howie G, Munford R. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  • Gillis S, Gates P. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. United Kingdom: Praeger, 2001.

• Book Chapters

  • Gillis S. Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance. In: Lisa Hopkins, ed. After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp.81-101.
  • Gillis S. 'Only from the Senses': Detection, Early Cinema and a Green Giant Spider. In: Shail, A, ed. Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2011, pp.144-154.
  • Gillis S. The Brand, the Intertext, and the Reader: Reading Desires in the Harry Potter Series. In: Julia Briggs, Dennis Butt, Matthew Grenby, ed. Popular Children's Literature in Britain. Aldershote: Ashgate, 2008, pp.301-316.
  • Gillis S. Entries for: Cadigan, P (1953-); Farmer, Nancy (1941-); Artificial Life. In: Reid,R, ed. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 2008, pp.49-50; 113-114; 16-18.
  • Gillis S. 'Many sisters to many brothers': the women poets of the First World War. In: Kendall T, ed. Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.100-113.
  • Gillis S. Feminist Criticism and the Technologies of the Body. In: Plain, G; Sellers, S, ed. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, pp.322-335.
  • Gillis S. Cyberspace/technologies: Of cyborgs and feminism. In: Richardson, Diane and Robinson, Victoria, ed. Introducing gender and women's studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  • Gillis S. Consoling Fictions: Mourning, World War One, and Dorothy L. Sayers. In: Rae, P, ed. Modernism and Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, pp.185-197.
  • Gillis S. Various Entries. In: Hammill, F., Sponenberg, A., Miskimmin, E, ed. Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950. Baskingstoke, UK / New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  • Gillis S. Various entries. In: Heywood, L.L, ed. The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-wave Feminism. Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.
  • Gillis S, Waters M. 'Mother, Home and Heaven': Nostalgia, Confession and Motherhood in Desperate Housewives. In: McCabe J; Akass K, ed. Reading Desperate Housewives. London: I.B.Tauris, 2006, pp.222-240.
  • Gillis S. Introduction. In: Gillis S, ed. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005, pp.1-8.
  • Gillis S. Cyber Noir: Cyberspace, (Post)Feminism and the Femme Fatale. In: Gillis S, ed. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005, pp.74-85.
  • Gillis S. Various Entries. In: Matthew, G.C.G., Harrison, B, ed. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Gillis S. Neither Cyborg nor Goddess: The (Im)Possibilities of Cyberfeminism. In: Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, ed. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, pp.185-196.
  • Gillis S, Munford R. Interview with Elaine Showalter. In: Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, ed. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. United States: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  • Gillis S. Entry for: Cyberculture. In: Kimmel, M.S., Aronson, A, ed. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California, USA ; Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO, 2004, pp.189-191.
  • Gillis S. Cybersex. In: Pamela Church Gibson, ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute, 2004, pp.92-101.
  • Gillis S. Cybercriticism. In: Wolfreys, J, ed. Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2002, pp.202-216.
  • Gillis S. Introduction. In: Gillis,S;Gates, P, ed. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. Westport, USA: Greenword Press, 2001, pp.1-10.
  • Gillis S. Encyclopedia Entry. In: Jolly, M, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London, UK: Routledge, 2001.

• Edited Books

  • Gillis S, Hollows J, ed. Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009.
  • Gillis S, Howie G, Munford R, ed. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
  • Gillis S, ed. The Matrix trilogy: cyberpunk reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005.

• Editorial

  • Gillis S, Munford R. Harvesting our strengths: Third wave feminism and women's studies. Journal of International Women's Studies 2003, 4(2), 1-6.