Pauline McGonagle

Email:

Telephone: 07464969754 

College: College of Humanities
Discipline: English
Department: Humanities
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for Literature and Archives


I completed a part-time PhD in 2023 on a Collaborative Doctoral Award funded by the AHRC. This was co-supervised by Dr Florian C J Stadtler, (formerly Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial, Postmodern and Twentieth Century Writing and Critical Theory at the University of Exeter), now a Lecturer in the Department of English, Migration and Mobilities, University of Bristol, and Rachel Foss, Head of Contemporary Manuscripts at the British Library.

Professor Laura Salisbury at The University of Exeter also contributed valuable supervisory time and feedback to this project.

The project involved collating and cataloguing a collection of personal papers, correspondence, prose manuscripts and notebooks of the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) who bequeathed eleven boxes of material to the British Library which they received in 2014.

My thesis title is: 'Disinheritance': constructions of identity in the prose works and archive of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

I completed an MA in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent funded by the Sasha Roberts Scholarship and the School of English. My dissertation topic was the humour in the writing of  Mumbai author Kiran Nagarkar. My Humanities with English degree was completed at the Open University UK.

This is a published blog about the early stages of my PhD research:

https://thestillpointjournal.com/2017/02/22/researchers-notebook-my-first-encounter-with-ruth-prawer-jhabvala/

This is my profile case study on the British Library website about the Collaborative Doctoral Award Programme. It also shows a video clip. It is filmed on location at the University of Exeter, including at their Special Collections and at the British Library. It also features supervisors: Dr Florian Stadtler, Rachel Foss and Ava Wood, daughter of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

https://www.bl.uk/case-studies/pauline-mcgonagle

This is a link to my recent 2019 publication in Wasafiri :

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690055.2019.1613006

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This is a link to a book review published in South Asian Diaspora journal. The first 50 downloads are free.  

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JVUYGKGDCQR5VV99RF92/ful?target=10.1080/19438192.2019.1676964

This is a link to a recently published English and Drama blog on the British Library website with reference to Jhabvala's refugee status, ambitions and contributions to cultural life. The article contributes to the British Library discussions on decolonisation.

https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2020/09/ruth-prawer-jhabvala-a-lifelong-refugee-1927-2013.html