Dr Jeni Williams
Contact Details
School of Cultural StudiesTel: 01267 676621 (6621)
E-mail: j.m.williams@tsd.ac.uk
Campus
Carmarthen CampusJob Title
Senior LecturerRole in the University
Lecturer [English/Creative Writing]Background
Jeni Williams is a widely published poet and editor who contributes to the BA programmes for English and Creative writing within the School of Cultural studies and is the Academic Director of the MA Creative Writing based in Carmarthen.
Centrally interested in issues of marginality, Dr Williams has focused on the politics of culture, and in particular on theories of gender and power. These foci informed all her teaching: from Women’s writing to postmodern self-reflection, from Jacobean tragedy to Welsh writing in English, from the late nineteenth century sensation novel to contemporary postcolonial writings. As her numerous publications demonstrate these interests continue to stimulate research activity.
Academic Interests
From her early career Dr Williams’s research interests reflect her interdisciplinary interests and approach. Her monograph, Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class, Histories, (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), examines cultural change by tracing the shifting roles and significance accorded to the apparently peripheral figure of the poetic nightingale from the Greeks to the Victorians. This interest in the peripheral and the marginal has drawn her to the politics of culture.
In 2005 she was contributing editor of Sideways Glances: Five Off-Centre Artists in Wales, (Parthian), a groundbreaking series of conversations between art practitioners. She has published widely on Welsh Writing in English, women’s writing, psychoanalytic criticism (including gender studies and the politics of the family).
Dr Williams writes regularly on literature, theatre and art for New Welsh Review and Planet, the two leading cultural journals within Wales, and was the theatre reviewer for New Welsh Review from 1997-2001. She is a reader for the Welsh Books Council
Publications
Dr Williams’s poetry has appeared in Agenda, Poetry Wales, New Writing, New Welsh Review, The London Magazine, Orbis, Planet Magazine and several anthologies. In 2008 she was contributing editor of Fragments from the Dark: Women Writing Home and Self in Wales, (Hafan): an anthology of women’s writing, including both work by professional and refugee writers. Her first collection, Being The Famous Ones, (Parthian), was published in 2009.
Recent academic articles include:
- ‘Adventures in Language: Contemporary Welsh Poetry in English,’ in Jim Persoon and Rob Watson, eds., A Companion to Twentieth Century British Poetry, (Michigan: Grand Valley State University, 2007);
- 'Intertexts in the European Text of the Nation: the Case of Welsh Women Writing in English', (in Patsy Stoneman (ed), European Intertexts: A Study of Women's Writing in English as Part of a European Fabric Volume 1: Issues and Methodologies, Peter Lang, 2005);
- ‘“The Modern Eye Needs a Resting Place”: Making a Space for Art Outside the Metropolis,’ in Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol.11: ‘Contemporary Wales’ 2005;
- 'Fantastic Fictions: Wales and Welsh Men in the Plays of Ed Thomas', in Lewis Davies ed., Ed Thomas: Selected Works, '95-'98, Parthian 2002.
