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Research

My research focuses primarily on women’s autobiographical practices in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. I am particularly interested in comparative approaches, whether they be considering works across languages and cultures or across media.

In my first monograph, I analysed intergenerational responses to traumatic loss in twenty-first-century Spanish and French women’s writing, two literatures whose influence to date on the field of life writing has differed considerably. I explored the questions that this dialogue between approaches raised for longstanding assumptions in autobiography studies and existing accounts of ethics in trauma theory.

My current project builds on these findings to respond to the lack of attention that has been afforded to autobiographical works by Spanish women in international discussions of life writing. Surveying diverse forms of self-representation, from grief memoirs to autofictional film, in dialogue with the socio-historical circumstances that have played a major role in shaping the practice, it traces key tendencies that have emerged from the 1940s to the present and explores the insights this body of work offers in the context of twenty-first-century theoretical discussions.
 

Teaching

I teach the full Prelims course for students in Spanish at Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College and convene 'Introduction to Hispanic Film' (XI) for students of Spanish Sole. For FHS, I teach peninsular options in literature and film for the modern period paper (VIII) and special authors including Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Federico García Lorca, and Benito Pérez Galdós for Paper XI. I co-teach options for Paper XII in women’s writing and supervise extended essays (XIV) and master’s theses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century prose and film.

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD candidates working on modern peninsular life-writing, women’s writing, and comparative projects on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish literature and film.
 

Publications

  • Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)
  • The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, ed. by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
  • Effe, Alexandra and Lawlor, Hannie, ‘Rethinking Autofiction as a Global Practice: Trajectories of Anglophone Criticism from 2000 to 2020’, a/b Auto/biography Studies (2024), 1–33

  •  ‘Conflicting Relations in Christine Angot’s Un amour impossible [‘An Impossible Love’]’, Journal of Romance Studies, 22.3 (2022), 311–30

    Forthcoming

  • ‘Resisting Imposed Identities in Postwar Fictions of the Self: Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945) and Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (1945)’, in Del franquismo a la democracia: género y autoridad en las auto/representaciones de las escritoras españolas de posguerra, ed. by Raquel Fernández Menéndez and Aina Pérez Fontdevila (forthcoming December 2024 in Hispanic Research Journal)
  •  ‘Post-Traumatic Transitions: Writing Women’s Lives in Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice]’, in Feminine Plural: Women in Transition in the Luso-Hispanic World, ed. by María-José Blanco and Claire Williams (forthcoming 2025 with Peter Lang)
  •  ‘Montage and Narrative Mode: Hybrid Stories and Storytelling by Contemporary Women Writers’, in Montage in Spanish and Portuguese Literature, ed. by Daniela Omlor and Luisa Coelho (forthcoming 2025 in Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies)
  • ‘Agnostic Memory and Impossible Conversations in Life Writing’, in Memory Studies in Spain and Portugal: A Handbook, ed. by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and Ellen W. Sapega (forthcoming with Brill)