Stacy Gillis

“It just gave me terminology and language. I grew up in rural Canada and I didn't have access to libraries, and it gave me access to terminology. And I then just began following my nose from there. My undergraduate degree was on Classics, but I was always very interested in kind of sexuality and women's bodies, and I did a Master's in English literature, and again I did it on deviancy and adultery in the late Victorian novel. That led to a PhD etc, etc. So, I'm politically and I'm personally a feminist. I try to embody that through my research practice in terms of being supportive and transparent, but at the same time, part of my research is about excavating voices that have not had a lot of airtime.”

“The tiger skin project came about when I was on maternity leave. I was up in the middle of the night and was holding a phone to read, because you can't hold a baby and a book. And I was on a site called Project Gutenberg, which compiles pre-copyright texts, and I discovered a writer called Eleanor Glynn. I began researching some writing about her. Glenn published a novel in 1907 called Three Weeks, which was a global phenomenon, like a combination of Harry Potter, the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy and Bridgerton. Everybody was reading it; everyone was talking about it. It is about an older woman who seduces or coerces a younger man into a sexual relationship and when they have sex, it is on the tiger skin. Then I began thinking about the idea of the tiger skin and how women's desire is often located. I originally thought it was going to be a book that people in the late 19th and early 20th century would call a ‘marriage problem novel’, because the woman who seduces the younger man is married. The 19th century novel is all about courtship and getting to the point of marriage. And then there were novels that were about marriages that were not very good, and I thought I was writing about that. But in the end, I was more interested in tiger skins. Thinking about tiger skins is not linked to the women murderers. There was a case in the 1920s, in which a woman and her lover were hung for murdering her husband, and four or five novelists immediately wrote novels about it, in the 1930s. We might see that now, but that didn't really happen in the 1930s. I'm quite interested in the cultural afterlife of objects and ideas and what happens to this woman who is hung for murder; how she is kind of transformed in terms of literary cultural occurrence. I see that being an article more than a book, though.”

“If anything, I’m interested in the interplay of gender and genre. If we have this particular form, what do we do when we are thinking about gender and sexuality in that? I'm a huge advocate for popular culture. I think that that is where the kind of litmus test takes place, in terms of how people are thinking about gender and sexuality, race or disability, and other things as well.”

“Family caring responsibilities really restricted you in terms of doing your work – it was more than not being able to get all the books I wanted. There was the talk of creating this covid impact form, but what I didn't see was an actual ‘How is this going to be implemented and how is this going to be to mitigate’. The penultimate may go on for 10 years, but to say ‘the pandemic ends’ is difficult; it is going to impact careers for five or 10 years. I have not seen any evidence of how those with caring responsibilities will be supported through this. And humanities are under attack throughout the west, and it may be that there's restructuring coming to the university. I have no sense that the university is thinking about the mitigation that's involved. I'm a single parent with two kids throughout the pandemic. My research was on hold. I could read that was it. I had no time for writing. How do they mitigate for that? It's not that there isn't an awareness of this, but there's no discussion happening as far as I know, around what to do about it so there's talking the talk but there's a disjunct there.”

“I have got colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, for example, and their literature history department got dumped. In the last ten or more years you've had this kind of drive for the government towards stem subjects and a devaluing of the humanities. What this means is that the humanities become low hanging fruit, in institutions that may be more financially precarious anyway. I think what's going to happen at Newcastle is probably that we're going to have to do a lot more teaching. Humanities subjects such as History, English, Media and other degrees have always been the cash cow at the university, because they can do big lecture hall teaching. But if those lecture halls aren't being filled because students don't see the value of a History degree, or an English Literature degree, then questions will be asked, and restructurings will happen.” As someone who comes from a non-academic and lower socio-economic family background and who studied literature, linguistics and media at university, I am used to questions like ‘what do you want to do with that in the future?’. Stacy thinks that subjects such as History and Literature can equip students with valuable skills, which are useful in a variety of contexts. “We have to do a lot of work on that, explaining how to sell, I hate these terms, English literature degrees, for example. The ability to make argument to synthesize information to do research that doesn't happen in a lot of other degrees. English and History really do that. And a lot of our graduates go on and they work in business, and they are really wanted in business, because of their humanities background, so it's a story, I think, we all have to tell together actually.”

“When I've worked with social scientists in the past, I found there is often a kind of sense about gathering evidence that the evidence becomes the argument, rather than the argument being the argument. One of the things humanities does is it teaches people how to make arguments. And it helps us understand what humans have done in the past and are doing now, in terms of telling stories about themselves, this is so important. This is something I think all of us in the humanities have to kind of go on about.”

“It's been really interesting because we're having to go through articles published before, on Athena Swan’s race quality charter, that kind of stuff. But it's all from a social sciences perspective, so it's all about data gathering and presentation and we're really interested in the aspect and the emotionality of it, and what does that mean. We're trying to theorize that and we're bringing in Sara Ahmed. And what the humanities bring to the table, I think, is this kind of focus on theoretical framework to build an argument, and it goes back to telling stories. I know it sounds trite, but it is important how we tell a story about ourselves, and that is what the university is for. My concern would be that the kind of focus on gender and sexuality becomes perhaps more productive than it is at the moment with a kind of more refractive humanities led theoretical lens which is windowing through various permutations of arguments, rather than trying to go ‘I've looked at these 10 things, this therefore means X’. Because the humanities are not about black and white, are they? And so, we go back to Shades of Grey – well, it is always about shades of grey and the argument you make about these shades of grey. An institution that loses that, will lose a lot for gender and sexuality research, but also for critical race studies, or for disability studies. You know these things will become diminished.”

“This is also a product of the faculty, because it's set up in a particular way and the university, and I'm not blaming them. It's just these things become ossified over years and people become set in silos and it becomes very hard to reach out outside of those silos.”