Caroline Webb

Associate Professor Caroline Webb is currently Head of English & Writing at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she specialises in English literature since 1900, especially fantasy literature. She is interested in how the politics of form emerges through subtle textual details, and has examined this in the writings of Modernist authors, especially Virginia Woolf, as well as in contemporary fiction. Her analyses of writings by Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson take a feminist affective narratological approach. She is currently studying the British fantasy tradition and is interested in its relationship to British postmodern fiction, especially in the form of rewritten fairy tales; she has recently commenced a project examining British fantasy literature of the 1920s. Her monograph on the children's fantasies of J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, and Diana Wynne Jones, Fantasy and the Real World in British Children's Literature: The Power of Story, was published by Routledge in October 2014.

Associate Professor Webb completed her PhD in English Literature and Language at Cornell University, aided by a Fulbright Postgraduate Travel Grant and the Andrew D. White Fellowship, and subsequently taught for eight years at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. She took up the position of Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle in July 1995, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer from January 2002 and to Associate Professor from January 2016. She studies and teaches English literature since 1900, and has also been active in University governance. She held a University of Newcastle Career Enhancement Fellowship for Academic Women in 2012, and served as Secretary of the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research for two two-year terms (2010-14). In addition to her book on Rowling, Pratchett, and Jones, she has published articles and book chapters on works by them and other authors including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Lewis Carroll. Her interests as reflected in teaching include narrative and representation, tradition and innovation in modern British literature, representations of female identity in English and Australian women's writing especially since 1900, and the relationship between cultural issues and narrative in science fiction and fantasy literature (including children's fantasy). She has extensive experience in supervision; many current student projects relate to her expertise in science fiction and fantasy literature, especially children's/young adult fantasy. In 2015 she was awarded the Faculty of Education and Arts Dean's Award for Research Supervision Excellence (Individual) at the University of Newcastle. In 2014 she was awarded an Australian Office of Learning and Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.