Professor Kirsti Bohata

• ''Am I Normal Yet?' Exploring Disability, Illness, and Normativity in Contemporary YA Romantic Fiction'.' (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Chris Pak

• Untitled (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Owen Sheers

• Untitled (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Daniel Williams

• Untitled Welsh Gothic (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alan Bilton

• Reading the British Mountainscape: Tour Writing and poetry on mountain landscapes, 1930-1955. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Daniel Williams

• Trans* Temporality: The representation of transgenderism within contemporary literature (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Sarah Gamble

• 'Intimate Otherness in Welsh Writing in English and Anglo-Irish Literature' (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Daniel Williams

• Merlinland: David Jones and the Modernist Writing of Wales (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Mr Geraint Evans

• Walking through landscapes and the current ecological crisis via the lens of the five elements. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Owen Sheers

• The Release of the Butterfly: The Emotional effects of a Life Changing/ Life Shattering Event, like sudden disability (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alan Bilton

• Wales and World War 2: representing unheard Welsh voices through historical fiction (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Owen Sheers

• The Function of the Frame and Poetic Space in a Selection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828-1882) Ekphrastic Poetry (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alice Barnaby

• Reflections in ‘Broken Mirrors’: Transnational Women’s Narratives Published in Britain in the 2000s (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Rachel Farebrother

• The Last Breath of Fire: Exploring women's identities in an imagined independent Wales. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Francesca Rhydderch

• Creative component: The Town, a work of creative non-fiction exploring a teenager's experience of edgelands, outshift landscapes and military topographies in Bridgend, South Wales. Critical component: Defining and evaluating an emerging eco-gothic landscape aesthetic capable of addressing urban and suburban childhood experience.«br /»«br /»«br /»«br /» (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alan Bilton

• Visible and invisible disability in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof David Turner

• Cyfraniad Menywod at Ddatblygiad Darlledu yng Nghymru yn ystod y 60au hirion (translated: Women's Contribution to the Development of Broadcasting in Wales during the long 60's) (awarded 2023)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Gwenno Ffrancon

• What influence did British Female Arabists have on the Anglo-Arab Relationship in the Middle East (1914-45)? (awarded 2023)

  MA

  Other supervisor: Dr Gethin Matthews

• EN-112 Approaches to Gender in English Literature

  The association of masculinity with the Word has dominated Western culture. In the Biblical story of Genesis, God creates Adam first, then Eve from Adam¿s rib. Women¿s ancillary role in the act of creation has persisted, leading to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar to open their study of women and writing, The Madwoman in the Attic (1975), with the question: `Is the pen a metaphorical penis?¿. On this module, we will be looking at examples of writers who not only challenge the masculinisation of authorship, but also use their work to openly resist it. We will be reading a range of texts from a range of periods ¿ medieval, early modern, the fin de siecle and the contemporary - which open out spaces for female and queer voices within literature. In order to help them generate their own readings of these works, students will also be introduced to debates within contemporary gender theory, drawing on the work of key thinkers such as Virginia Woolf, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler.

• EN-120 English Essentials

  This is a skills-based module which will equip students with the technical and critical expertise that is necessary for their academic journey in English Literature and Creative Writing. It is designed to support the transition from post-16 study to undergraduate study and to show students *how* to become successful scholars of English. How should we read texts? How do we write essays? Focusing on an exciting anthology of texts selected by the English academics at Swansea, this team-taught module uncovers the power of written language. We will explore how writers inspire and challenge their readers, how to think critically, how to close-read, how to construct powerful arguments and how to produce written work that is rigorous, academic and convincing. This module empowers students to think, write, and persuade.

• EN-241 Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain

  The nationality question has been a persistent theme in British politics, most obviously in recent decades in relationship to questions of immigration and settlement, Britain¿s membership of Europe, the `troubles¿ and `peace process¿ in Ulster, and the resurgence of forms of devolution and nationalism in Wales and Scotland. This course explores the ways in which the diverse literatures of the British Isles have responded to, and shaped, debates around these issues. The questions asked on the course will include: How does a `four nations¿ approach, well-established in historical studies, function in literary studies? What are the key differences and similarities between the literatures produced in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? To what extent does literature reflect social identities, and to what extent is it active in their creation? If all identities are in as sense `imagined¿, why have certain kinds of identities been significant in particular periods? Is an aesthetics informed by nationalism inevitably conservative and restrictive? Are linguistically experimental writers always skeptical of collective identities? Are we witnessing the `break up¿ of Britain in contemporary literature, or is Britishness being reconstructed anew?

• EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

  The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module designed to develop high-level academic skills and intellectual independence in the students. A first-semester skills-building programme will include: research skills, summary skills, bibliographic skills, ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation of a thesis and bibliography, presentational skills and public speaking. Students conduct research on a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of the English literature staff. The topic will be devised to fall within staff research and teaching specialisms, broadly defined. Students attend group sessions on research skills in Semesters 1 and 2, and have individual meetings with supervisors in Semester 2.

• EN-3040 Welsh Gothic / Gothic Wales

  Gothic literature explores the transgressive, the marginal, the queer. Full of disturbing doubles, uncanny hauntings and repressed histories, gothic writing has been characterised as a `schizophrenic¿ form. It is no wonder that Wales, a marginal territory haunted by its troubled relationship to the British state and its own cultural losses, has a long tradition of gothic writing. The Welsh horror writer, Arthur Machen, was at the centre of the British resurgence of gothic fiction in the 1890s and Welsh gothic writing remained a major form in literature from Wales throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In Welsh gothic, the very landscape of Wales is a treacherous, unnavigable wilderness, strewn with relics of a distant pagan past, haunted by revenants of another time. The uncanny fiction we read on this module wrestles with: ideas of inheritance, race and ethnicity on the borders; incest, abuse and claustrophobia in rural Wales; conflicted loyalties to gender and nation in the female gothic; ghostly affinities between women in Welsh lesbian gothic; violent revenge and national resistance. On this module we will study the way gothic conventions offer a way of understanding national identity and history, but also how Welsh gothic develops its own particular traditions within the genre.

• EN-M42 Welsh Identities: literature and nationhood

  What does it mean when we speak of Wales and 'Welshness'? How does the study of literary texts help us to answer such questions? What is the relationship between literature and nationhood? Drawing on a wide range of texts this course begins by exploring the ways in which Welsh national identity has been described and represented by Welsh writers in the twentieth century. We then proceed to explore other kinds of communal identities that have been equally prominent in the ways in which the Welsh have thought of themselves and envisaged their place in the world. We explore how class, gender, religious and ethnic identities have reinforced and challenged an often precarious sense of ' Welshness', and trace the tensions as they take aesthetic form in the writings of Emyr Humphreys, Christopher Meredith, Raymond Williams, Trezza Azzopardi and others.

• EN-M44 Gender, Genre and the Nation: Women Writing Modern Wales

  This course explores the range and diversity of Welsh women's writing in English. We will question and explore the legitimacy of reading and organizing literary texts along lines of gender, will ask whether there is a distinctive form of Welsh women's writing, and interrogate the ways in which forms of feminism have interacted with other cultural forces and political ideologies (eg class, nationalism, language) in Wales. We begin by exploring ideas of tradition and canon formation in the light of feminist criticism before going on to discuss the writings of early Welsh feminists and their relationship with nation (Amy Dillwyn, Bertha Thomas, Sara Maria Saunders), before moving on to look at Welsh women modernists (Lynette Roberts, Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Hilda Vaughan), rewriting industrial and post-industrial experience (Kate Roberts, Menna Gallie, Rachel Trezise), and a range of contemporary of contemporary voices animating the Welsh literary scene from Catrin Dafydd and Gwyneth Lewis to Trezza Azzopardi and Charlotte Williams. There will be two additional (optional) sessions in the archives to introduce students to using archival resources in their studies.

• EN-M80 Practising Ideas: Advanced Research Skills in English / Contemporary Writing / Welsh Writing in English

  This module is designed to introduce you to key practical and conceptual tools necessary for scholarship at Master¿s level and beyond. The aim is for you to gain the competencies and confidence to complete and enjoy the degree. In a seminar and occasional workshop format, you will practise a range of core professional research skills. You will be encouraged to reflect on your own learning and academic development to become a more independent and self-directed lifelong learner. You will produce a Portfolio of assessed work. These activities will support your work in other MA modules, particularly EN-M41 Research Practice and your EN-M31 Dissertation, while also equipping you with a set of transferable skills that are highly valued by many employers.

• EN-M89 Publishing: Cultures and Contexts

  This team-taught module introduces students to different cultures and contexts of the publishing industry and its history. Students will gain both practical and intellectual skills across a range of topics taught by staff from English Literature and Creative Writing. The module begins with focused seminars on book history and print culture, and then moves on to workshops in which students will gain a familiarity with industry terminology and the mechanisms of the book trade. Students will be able to choose from different methods of assessment that develop academic or industry-focused skills.

• A New Literary Geography: Establishing a Digital Literary Atlas of Wales and its Borderlands. 2016 - 2019

  , £496,000

• Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields, 1780-1948 2011 - 2016

  , £973,000

• Difference and Desire: homoeroticism, gender and nation in the life and fiction of Amy Dillwyn 2012 - 2012

  , £32,000

• Co-Chair, Association for Welsh Writing in English

  2010 - Present

Kirsti Bohata a regular speaker at community events as well as contributing to national media in English and (given enough time to prepare) in Welsh.  

Her collaboration with artists and theatre makers has led not only to her research reaching a wider audience, but to the framing of new research questions based on a two-way engagement with the public, media and the arts.

Recent talks and broadcasts:

‘Amy Dillwyn’ to pupils in year 5 and 6 at Ysgol Gyfyn Llwynderw, West Cross, Swansea (25 February 2020)

‘Bright Field’, Winter Edition, The Globe, Hay on Wye (17 January 2020)

‘Solastalgia, Literature and Place’ at Swper Hâf GRAFT | GRAFT Summer Supper, at Graft: A Soil Based Syllabus, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 11 August 2019.

Pre-recorded contribution to ‘Arwyr’ (on Amy Dillwyn) BBC Radio Cymru 2 & BBC Radio Cymru broadcast 1 Ebrill 2019

Progressive Landscapes: Architecture, Power, Place organised by the National Trust at Dinefwr Park, 16 March 2019

In Conversation with Seán Vicary 

‘A queer-looking lot of women: transgender narratives’ Glynn Vivian’s LGBT History Month, February 2019

‘Amy Dillwyn’s Queer Archives’, Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University, February 2019

In conversation with Seán Vicary: ‘, Small World Theatre, Cardigan, 20 October 2018

Live interview on One Hundred Years of Women’s Suffrage, Good Morning Wales, BBC Radio Wales, 6 February 2018

The extraordinary life of Amy Dillwyn with The Ladies of Llangollen, LGBT History Month at the National Waterfront Museum, 9 February 2018

‘Postcolonial Wales’, Desolation Radio Postcast (Soundcloud), 21 January  2018

Iconoclast: Amy Dillwyn, Abergavenny History Society, Borough Theatre, Abergavenny, 6 April 2017

‘All Queered Up’, Spring Out / Aberration, Aberystwyth, 19 February 2016

Consultant and Contributor to documentary on Amy Dillwyn, Mamwlad: Cyfres 2, S4C, broadcast on 2 October 2015, 27 January 2017, 21 March 2018, 30 April 2019.

'Now you see her...: Lesbian literature from Wales', National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 14 February 2015

'Amy Dillwyn: Loving Women in a Man's World', National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 15 February 2014

‘Dylan Thomas’ Swansea Uplands: The Boy and the Young Dog’ Literature Wales, Dylan Odyssey, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 12 July 2014

'Amy Dillwyn: Pioneer', Historical Association, National Waterfont Museum, 18 May 2013

'Amy Dillwyn: industrialist, novelist, feminist', International Women's Day, Morgan's Hotel, Swansea, 8 March 2013

'Amy Dillwyn: love and life', Port Talbot History Society, 5 December, 2012

‘Dillwyn Day: Science Culture Society, National Waterfront Museum, 22 June 2012

Amy Dillwyn and The Rebecca Rioter: A Literary Tour, 21 July 2012