Julia Dallaway is a writer and an academic researcher of modern and contemporary Anglophone literature, with particular expertise in life-writing, the essay form, women’s writing, and memory studies. The common thread throughout her work is an interest in the capacity of certain literary forms to represent something of the complexity of lived experience and memory.
Julia is currently completing the final year of her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis provisionally titled ‘The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion’, supervised by Professor Kate McLoughlin. Her thesis explores how certain twentieth-century Anglophone women writers turned to the essay form for the purposes of life-writing. Julia teaches tutorials and seminars at Oxford on various topics within modern literature, contemporary literature, and life-writing studies to undergraduate and visiting students. She also supervises undergraduate dissertations.
Julia’s academic work has been published in Critical Quarterly and is forthcoming in two edited collections on Virginia Woolf and the independent Irish publisher Tramp Press, respectively. Alongside this work, she writes for a wider audience in the form of creative-critical essays and book reviews, which have featured in publications including The Oxonian Review and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, have won an Editor’s Choice Award, and have been 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). During her time at Edinburgh, she was also a Reader for the 2021 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.