Emily Cuming

Dr Emily Cuming is a research fellow in the School of English at the University of Leeds .

Her research interests focus on the relations between literary form, subjectivity and the idea of the domestic interior in Victorian, twentieth-century and contemporary British literature and culture. She is currently completing a monograph, Housing Stories, which focuses on narrative constructions of self and collective identity in the context of working-class and ‘marginalized’ housing environments from the mid-Victorian period to the present. Emily’s other current research projects investigate the complex construction of relations between identity-formation and housing type. One project focuses on portrayals of social housing in the Leeds and Bradford areas, tracing the emergence of the housing estate in literature and film as a significant topographical setting for working-class female adolescence and motherhood (with particular reference to works by Ken Loach, Andrea Dunbar, Helen Cross and Clio Barnard.) A second project explores the ambivalent figure of the British landlady in literature and media—as homeworker, surrogate mother and lover—from the mid-Victorian period to the 1960s.

Publications

‘Private Lives, Social Housing: Female Coming-Of-Age Stories on the British Council Estate, ’Contemporary Women’s Writing, 7:3 (2013), 328-45.

‘“Home is home be it never so homely”: Reading Mid-Victorian Slum Interiors’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:3 (2013), 368-386.