Tara S. Thomson

Biography

I am a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Edinburgh Napier University, as well as Programme Leader for the MA in Digital and Public Humanities. My research interests fall generally into modernism, critical theory, women’s writing, and the Digital Humanities.

I was awarded a PhD from the University of Victoria in 2014. My doctoral thesis examined representations of women’s everyday lives in modernist British fiction, specifically the works of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield. It argued that, through disruptive aesthetic techniques, these authors’ works reveal ideological continuities at the level of everyday life and complicate discourses of feminist progress and feminine modernism. I have a forthcoming monograph from Routledge emerging from that research.

My research interests extend to the Digital Humanities, and I have worked on a number of Digital Humanities research projects, including most significantly Palimpsest: Literary Edinburgh, a large-scale text mining and digital mapping project, which led to the development and launch of a database and interactive map of Edinburgh literature called Lit Long: Edinburgh (litlong.org).

I am also committed to teaching and academic skills development, engaging in continued professional development and pedagogical research.