Prof Patricia Waugh

Patricia Waugh has been a professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University since 1997. Her first book was Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984). She has since authored and edited many books and essays on modern fiction, modernism and postmodernism, feminist theory, contemporary fiction and literary theory. Her recent interests have been in the relations between the arts and the sciences and interdisciplinary negotiations beyond the two cultures. She is completing a monograph entitled, The Fragility of Mind in Modernism and After: Voices in the Risk Society , examining the relationship between literary cultures and texts and theories and philosophies of mind since 1900. She is also completing a book with Marc Botha, Critical Transitions: Genealogies of Intellectual Change arising out of her work as PI on a collaborative Leverhulme funded project at Durham University on Tipping Points which examines issues around modeling complex dynamic systems from a humanities and science perspective with respect to climate change, social behaviours, economic tips etc. She is also developing work for a new monograph  - part of a contribution to a Wellcome-funded collaborative research project at Durham on Hearing the Voice on which she is a PI - on voices in literature, focussing on  Virginia Woolf and examining Woolf's experiments with voice in relation to narratological and aesthetic, psychological and philosophical  theories of voice and hearing voices and her own experiences as a voice hearer with the medicine of her day.