Dr Rhiannon Cogbill

• Modernism
• Twentieth-century literature and culture
• Emotion and the modern medical institution
• Medical humanities
• Disability studies
• Women’s writing

• Advance HE Associate Fellow
• PhD English Literature, University of Birmingham
• MA Literature and Culture (Distinction), University of Birmingham
• BA English (First-Class Honours), University of Birmingham

• British Association for Modernist Studies
• British Society for Literature and Science
• Glasgow Medical Humanities Network

For 2023/24, Rhiannon is leading the second-year undergraduate literature module ‘The Victorians’.

Rhiannon is currently writing a monograph which considers how ideas about women and health operate in the work of three major early twentieth-century modernist writers: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and May Sinclair.

She is also working on consumption and suffragist thought in twentieth-century novels, and ways of reading patient-authored asylum periodicals (following a 2021 scoping project supported by the Glasgow Medical Humanities Network).

Publications

• ‘“Going Deaf” in Stella Benson’s Living Alone’, The Modernist Review, 34 (2021)

Conference Papers

• ‘“It’s in t’blood”: Heredity in May Sinclair’s The Three Sisters’, International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science, University of Birmingham, 10–12 April 2024
• ‘Medical and Financial Entanglements in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, Postgraduate Medical Humanities Conference, University of Exeter, 7–8 June 2018
• ‘“Don’t look round”: The politics of the street encounter in Jean Rhys’s interwar novels’, The City as Modernist Ephemera, London South Bank University, 16 June 2017

‘“[H]er own rules for beef stew”: The “visible contours” of obsessive-compulsive disorder in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle’, Cultures of Anxiety, University of Bristol, 8–9 June 2017