Carol Acton

PhD, Queen's
MA, Kent at Canterbury
BA Honours, Trinity College, Dublin

Extension: 28238
Office: SJU Sweeney Hall 2201
Email: cgacton@uwaterloo.ca

Biography

My PhD thesis was on First World War British poetry. Since then I have worked on gender and war and more broadly on subjective experiences as they are represented in life-writings, especially examining war and grief and war and trauma. My teaching areas include modern British literature, women’s writing, and autobiography/life-writing and Communications in Mathematics and Computer Science. 

Selected publications

Books

(ed.) British Women and War Nursing, (introduction and edited collection of facsimile text primary sources on British women’s war nursing from the Crimea to the Second World War) Vol V Women and War,  Routledge History of Feminism Series, (Routledge, 2020

(with Dr. Jane Potter) Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in Warzones. Manchester University Press, 2015.

(ed.) A Very Private Diary: A Nurse in Wartime by Mary Morris. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 2014.

Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan: 2007.

Articles and Chapters in Books

Vera Brittain’ in Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War, edited by Ralf Schneider (De Gruyter, 2021) (6000 wds)

‘Storm Jameson’ in Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War, edited by Ralf Schneider (De Gruyter, 2021) (6500+ wds)

‘May Sinclair’ in Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War, edited by Ralf Schneider (De Gruyter, 2021) (6500 wds)

‘Non-Combatants and Others’ in The Cambridge History of First World War Poetry edited by Jane Potter (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (7000+ wds) in Press

(with Dr Jane Potter), ‘“Sticking it”: resilience in the life-writing of medical personnel in the First World War’ inThe First World War and Health: Rethinking Resilience, edited by Leo Van Bergen (Brill, 2020) 

‘Obsessed by the obscenity of war’: Emotional and physical wounds in Mary Borden’s poetry and Lesley Smith’sFour Years out of Life, Journal of War and Culture Studies vol 11 2018

‘Self-Writing’ in Gender: War, edited by Andrea Pető (Macmillan/Gale, 2017)

 ‘Life and Death at the Front: Teaching War in a Literary space’  in Teaching Representations       of the First World War edited by Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee (Modern Languages Association 2017)

‘”The Delightful Sense of Personal Contact That Your Letter Aroused”: Letters and Intimate Lives in the First World War’, in Landscapes and Voices of the Great War, edited by Angela K. Smith and Krista Cowman, (Routledge: 2017)

“You Yourself Are Here Now Looking Over My Shoulder As I Write”: Emotional Dialogue and the Construction of a Shared Intimate Space in First World War Letters. L’ Atelier, Vol. 8, No 1 (2016)

Fellowships & Awards

• 2012-13 uWaterloo SSHRC 4A grant
• 2010-11 uWaterloo SSHRC 4A grant
• 2009-10 uWaterloo SSHRC seed grant
• 2009 Oxford Brookes University Institute for Historical and Cultural Research (IHCR) Visiting Research Fellow

Current research

I am currently working on letter exchanges during the two World Wars as a way of understanding the relationship between language, the subjective experience and the larger cultural context.

Areas of graduate supervision

• War in literature and life-writing
• Autobiography
• Modern British writers, especially non-canonical women writers