Dr Julia Dallaway is an early-career academic researcher and lecturer, as well as a freelance book reviewer and essayist. She works primarily in the field of modern and contemporary literature (roughly from 1900 to the present), with particular expertise in life-writing, the literary essay, women’s writing, and memory studies.
Julia is currently based at the University of Oxford, where she holds roles as Study Mentor in English at Exeter College and Research Assistant at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She also teaches visiting students at Worcester College, Mansfield College, and Regent’s Park College on Victorian, modern, and contemporary literature, as well as transhistorical studies of the literary essay and of life-writing. She has supervised multiple undergraduate dissertations on modern authors including Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac.
Julia is a Post-Award Member of Oxford’s Faculty of English, where she recently completed her DPhil (2025, Pass with no corrections), supervised by Professor Kate McLoughlin. Her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion’, explored how twentieth-century life-writing turned towards the techniques of the essay form in order to engage with emerging psychological theories of memory. She is now working to turn her thesis into a monograph, while also preparing for a postdoctoral research project on life-writing texts that use place, rather than time, as their primary organising structure.
Julia’s academic research has been published in a volume of selected papers on Virginia Woolf and is forthcoming in an edited collection on the independent Irish publisher Tramp Press. Alongside this work, she writes book reviews and creative-critical essays. Her reviews have featured or are forthcoming in academic journals—such as Modernism/modernity and Critical Quarterly—and literary magazines, including the Times Literary Supplement. Her 2021 creative-critical essay ‘The Great Revelation’, published in Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, won an Editor’s Choice Award for Creative Nonfiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Following a state-school education, Julia studied BA English Language and Literature (2019, First Class Honours) at Worcester College, Oxford, where she developed her keen interests in life-writing and the essay form. She then pursued these interests further at the University of Edinburgh, where she studied MSc Literature and Modernity: 1900 to the Present (2021, Distinction) and wrote a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s influence on contemporary essayist Rebecca Solnit. During her time at Edinburgh, Julia was also a Reader for the 2021 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.