Dr Julia Dallaway is a reader, writer, thinker, researcher, and teacher. As an early-career academic, she works 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 a Post-Award Member of the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, 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. While at Oxford, Julia taught tutorials and seminars to undergraduate and visiting students on various topics within modern literature and contemporary literature, as well as transhistorical courses on the literary essay and on life-writing. She also supervised multiple undergraduate dissertations. Authors she is most fascinated by include Michel de Montaigne, Thomas De Quincey, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary McCarthy, J. D. Salinger, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, J.-B. Pontalis, Marilynne Robinson, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Michaels, Sinéad Gleeson, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Brian Dillon, and Amina Cain.
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, Modernist Cultures, 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.