Emily Ridge

I completed my B.A. at Trinity College Dublin and M.A. at University College London. In 2012, I was awarded my PhD at Durham University. I took up a position as Lecturer in the English Department here at the National University of Ireland Galway in 2020, having previously taught at City University of Hong Kong and the Education University of Hong Kong.

My research expertise is in modernist and mid-twentieth-century literature, more specifically forms of transnational and cross-cultural displacement, mobile material culture, narrative form, modern women's writing, and, more recently, literary engagements with emotion and empathy. My first monograph was published in July 2017 by Edinburgh University Press, Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light. It considers the impact of a new culture of portability upon modernist visions of and approaches to fiction, spanning from the late nineteenth century to World War II.

My work on precarious forms of travel in the 1930s and 1940s led to an interest in fraught literary representations of hospitality and empathy in late modernist and postwar writing, particularly the ways in which such troubled depictions invoke and reflect upon acts of political diplomacy, immigration, welfare and the reception of refugees across the continent of Europe around the Second World War. In this area, I collaborated with Jeffrey Clapp on an edited volume published by Routledge in 2016: Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. 

My current book-length project, entitled Managing Emotion is Mid-Twentieth Century Women's Writing in Britain, 1930-1975, illuminates and examines a double-edged discourse surrounding emotional expression that emerged in women's writing of the mid-century period, with a view to the wider practices and histories of emotion management. This is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (expected 2027). 

Articles based on other aspects of my research have been published in journals such as Modernist Cultures (2021), Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2019), Papers on Language and Literature (2019), Literature Compass (2016), Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (2015), Modernism/Modernity (2014), Textual Practice (2013), and Katherine Mansfield Studies (2013). I also recently co-edited (with Dr Alexandra Peat) a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on 'Discourses of Emotional Labour' (2023).

I was a founding member of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA) and a Co-Editor for the Modernist Geographies section of Literature Compass from 2021 to 2024.

For more information on my monograph: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-portable-modernisms.html

For more information on the volume I co-edited: https://www.routledge.com/Security-and-Hospitality-in-Literature-and-Culture-Modern-and-Contemporary-Perspectives/Clapp-Ridge/p/book/9780367873516

I welcome expressions of interest from potential postgraduate students in any aspect of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction.