Julia recently completed her DPhil in English (2025, Pass with no corrections) at the University of Oxford, 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 reflect 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.

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 and literary magazines including Modernist Cultures, Critical Quarterly, and 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 the essay as a life-writing form. During her time at Edinburgh, she was also a Reader for the 2021 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.