Joanna Yates

Biography

On completion of her BA English Literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada in 1998, Jo returned to the UK to work in both private and public sectors. In 2020, she returned to academia to undertake an MA English Literature at Keele. Her academic interests lie in the long eighteenth century generally, but specifically with the women poets of that period.

Research and scholarship

Jo’s MA dissertation, A Courteous Corrective: Emily Dickinson on Ralph Waldo Emerson, examines Dickinson’s measured and delicate rebuttal of Emerson’s androcentric philosophy within the realm of their literary works.

Her PhD research project, Inheriting Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature: Family History, Evolutionary Thought, and Public Debate, is an AHRC-funded PhD studentship in collaboration with the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum and the Erasmus Darwin House. Through close examination of the social and intellectual contexts of Darwin’s philosophical poem The Temple of Nature (1803), she aims to offer a revaluation of ‘the significance the Darwin family acquired in scientific and wider public debates about inheritance following the publication of Origin of Species (1859) and other evolutionary works’.

Jo’s supervisors are Professor David Amigoni and Professor Nicholas Seager.

Further information

Affiliations

• EDI Student Representative for Keele, NWCDTP
• British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies - www.bsecs.org.uk

Collaborations and grants awards

• Thomas Keymer Award, BSECS
• MA Contemporary Literature and Film Dissertation Prize 2020/21, Keele
• Best Overall Student on an English PGT Programme 2020/21, Keele