Jodie Matthews
Country of residence
United Kingdom
Brief introduction
Research Fellow, University of Huddersfield
Education
PhD, Critical and Cultural Theory, 2008, Cardiff University (UK).
Academic profile
My postdoctoral research focuses on the representation in various cultural forms of internal migrants in nineteenth-century Britain, including Romani people, canal boat people, seasonal workers and showmen. I am interested in the ways in which these groups were described in parallel and the shared features of these groups’ stereotypes, as well as the continued discursive effects in the twenty-first century of these historical attitudes. I am currently undertaking an Arts and Humanities Research Council review of academic literature on the representation of Gypsies/Roma/Romanies and Travellers in Britain, which is funded as part of the cross-council ‘Connected Communities’ programme. Academically, I am a product of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, meaning that my key interests are in deploying critical theory (including deconstruction and psychoanalysis) to interrogate textual representations, demonstrating the tensions and contradictions inherent in such discourses as race, gender, nation, and empire.
Publications
- Matthews, J (2010) ‘Back where they belong: Gypsies, kidnapping and assimilation in Victorian children’s literature'’ Romani Studies 5 , 20 (2), pp. 137-159. ISSN 1757–2274
- Matthews, J (2011) ‘Borrowing Welshness: Wild Wales, affiliation and identity’ North American Journal of Welsh Studies , 6 (1), pp. 53-61. ISSN 1554-8112
- Matthews, J (2010) ‘Theodore Watts-Dunton’, ‚Charles Godfrey Leland’ and ‚George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy’, The Literary Encyclopedia . ISSN 1747-678X
Keywords
Literature; representation; nineteenth-century culture, migrancy
Contact
j.matthews@hud.ac.uk
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