Athena Heavey

Biography

Athena has been studying at Keele University since September 2018. She firstly undertook her English Literature BA, graduating with a first-class honours degree and receiving three awards: the Charles Swann Prize for American Literature 2020/21, the Munro-Carrigan Prize for Early Modern and Contemporary Literature 2020/2021, and the English Final Year Prize for Best Student Overall 2020/21. She then progressed onto the MA English Literatures at Keele, completing her degree in September 2022.

In October 2022, Athena was awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistantship and thus commenced her doctoral studies within the School of Humanities. Her PhD thesis revolves around portrayals of the Holocaust in twenty-first-century historical fiction, specifically examining developing approaches towards its contemporary representation made necessary by modern society's diminishing access to its historical reality as the legacy of the Shoah shifts from memory to post-memory.

Her supervisors are Dr Nicholas Bentley (Keele University), Dr Rebecca Bowler (Keele University), and Professor Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester).

She can be found on Twitter at @AthenaHeavey

Research and scholarship

My doctoral thesis examines works of Holocaust fiction published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, considering how approaches to representing the Shoah imaginatively are changing to reflect the gradual decline in the accessibility of its historical reality. It observes how the generational distance between the events of the Shoah and the present dilutes contemporary memory of the Holocaust as it is now formed by proxy, rather than through direct recollection. In turn, modern society's ability both to comprehend and convey the Holocaust's historical reality with authenticity regresses and new ethical concerns regarding the appropriateness of contemporary authorship have emerged as a result.

I am thus intrigued by the array of narratological and typographical strategies implemented by contemporary authors of Holocaust fiction to metafictionally acknowledge their own personal and authorial limitations which impose their ability to comprehend and convey the events of the Shoah with authenticity. I seek to investigate how these techniques act to transition contemporary Holocaust fiction away from the realism adopted by authors who were themselves Holocaust survivors and reconfigure works of contemporary fiction about the Shoah as tools of commemoration, thus distinguishing them from previous first-generation testimonial accounts.

My wider research interests include neo-historical fiction, the relationship between history and literature, memory and trauma studies, and the ethics of imaginative historical representation.

Teaching

I am a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Humanities and I am currently completing the Introduction to Teaching and Demonstration course provided by the Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence (KIITE).

I am a seminar tutor for ENG-20060 'Contemporary World Literature'.

Further information

Academic service

• Reviewer, Historical Novels Review, 2022-Present
• Committee Member, Keele Humanities and Social Sciences Work in Progress Seminar Series, 2021-Present
• Student Voice Representative, Keele English Literature MA, 2021-2022
• Student Voice Representative, Keele English Literature BA, 2019-2021

Professional affiliations

• Historical Novel Society
• British & Irish Association for Holocaust Studies
• The National Holocaust Centre and Museum
• The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies

Collaborations and grants awards

Awards and honours

• Graduate Teaching Assistant Scholarship, 2022.
• Recipient of a £1000 Humanities Masters Scholarship 2021/2022.
• Recipient of the Charles Swann Prize for American Literature 2020/2021.
• Recipient of the Munro-Carrigan Prize for Early Modern and Contemporary Literature 2020/2021.
• Recipient of the English Final Year Prize for the Best Student Overall 2020/2021.