Dr Jeni Williams
Contact Details
School of Creative Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Studies
Tel: 01267 676621 (6621)
E-mail : j.m.williams@trinity-cm.ac.uk
Job Title
LecturerRole in the University
Lecturer [English/Art History]Further information
Jeni Williams is involved with the BA English and BA Creative writing courses within the School of Creative Arts and Humanities. She is responsible for courses that stress creative work and in this capacity delivers modules on writing for the Theatre and contributes core modules on the History of Art to the BA in Fine Art. Drawing on both her interest in theatre and her doctoral research into literary history, she teaches a course devoted to Shakespeare. Centrally interested in issues of marginality, Dr Williams has focused on issues of gender and culture (Women’s writing, Victorian writing) and marginalised nationalities (Welsh Writing in English).
Dr Williams’s research interests reflect her interdisciplinary approach. Her monograph, Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class, Histories (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), examines cultural change by tracing the shifting roles and significance accorded to the apparently peripheral figure of the poetic nightingale from the Greeks to the Victorians. This interest in the peripheral and the marginal has drawn her to both postcolonial criticism and gender studies. She has published widely on Welsh Writing in English, women’s writing, psychoanalytic criticism (including gender studies and the politics of the family). She is, or has been, a reviewer of books on Welsh Writing in English and poetry for the Welsh Books Council, Books in Wales, Gothic Literature, The David Jones Journal. She is a reader for the Welsh Books Council. She writes regularly on literature, theatre and art for New Welsh Review and Planet, the two leading cultural journals within Wales, and was the theatre reviewer for New Welsh Review from 1997-2001.She wrote the introduction to Clyde Holmes, Feather Paths (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2004). She is the general Arts editor for Parthian Books, and contributing editor of Sideways Glances: five off-centre artists in Wales (Parthian, 2005). Dr Williams is organising Travelling to New World: Immigration, Emigration and the Experience of Wales, the 18th Annual Conference of the Association of Welsh Writing in English at Gregynog Hall, 7-9 April 2006.
Recent academic articles include: ‘“The Modern Eye Needs a Resting Place:” Peter Bodenham and making a space for art outside the metropolis,’ (Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol.11: ‘Contemporary Wales’),'Intertexts in the European Text of the Nation: the Case of Welsh Women Writing in English', (in Patsy Stoneman (ed), European Intertexts: A Study of Women's Writing in English as Part of a European Fabric Volume 1: Issues and Methodologies, Peter Lang, 2005); 'Fantastic Fictions: Wales and Welsh Men in The Plays of Ed Thomas', (in Ed Thomas: Selected Works, '95-'98, Parthian, 2002).