Dr Emily Bell

Academic Career

• 2026–2028: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Loughborough University
• 2024-2026: Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow, Loughborough University
• 2019-2023: PhD, University of Antwerp (Supervised by Professor Dirk Van Hulle and Dr Ronan Crowley)
• 2018-2019: MA, University of Galway (English)
• 2014-2017: BA (Hons), University of Oxford (English Language & Literature)

Professional Responsibilities and Awards

• Harry Ransom Center Fellow (2026)
• International James Joyce Foundation Emerging Scholar Award (2024)
• Postgraduate Representative for British Association of Modernist Studies and Co-Editor of The Modernist Review (2021-2023)
• Support Young Researchers Grant (OJO), University of Antwerp (October 2022)
• Grant for a long stay abroad, Research Foundation – Flanders (August-September 2022)
• Friends of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation Scholar (August – September 2022)
• Trieste Joyce School Scholar (July 2022)
• International James Joyce Foundation Scholar (June 2021)

Emily Bell specialises in modernism, the methodology of genetic criticism, book history, intertextuality and writing processes. She is particularly interested in reconstructing literary, material and social histories through the traces they leave in literary archives.

Emily is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow on the project ‘Modernism and Illness Experience: Embodied Strategies of Textual Production’ (MODIX). Emily’s research project uses the method of genetic criticism to consider how ill health impacted the modernist writing processes of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. She is interested in the potential for archives to reveal hidden histories of creative composition, particularly regarding feminist recovery and environments of care. This research also contributes towards the Health Humanities Research Group’s work.

Emily is also working on a monograph based on her recent doctoral research on James Joyce’s library. This research combines insights from the fields of genetic criticism, bibliography and book history to illuminate the history of Joyce’s bibliographic environment in material and socio-cultural terms. This research aligns with the work of the Editing and Textual Scholarship and Cultural Currents: Nineteenth to Twentieth Century Research Groups.

Articles:

• “Hiding in Plain Sight: Networking Women in James Joyce’s Archive”, Feminist Modernist Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2025.2520107.
• (With Andrea Davidson) “The Sick Body Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism”, Humanities 13, no. 3: 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030073.
• “When Joyce Met St. John Greer Ervine,” James Joyce Quarterly 1-2 (Fall 2023-Winter 2024): 130–141.
• “Patriarchal Associations in the Drafting of “Proteus” and “Sirens”,” Genetic Joyce Studies, issue 21, Spring 2021. https://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/articles/GJS21/GJS21_Bell.
• “James Joyce’s Lifetime Library - Bibliographic Metadata,” Zenodo, 28 November 2023, doi:10.5281/zenodo.10213141.
• “Reading Through the Canon: A 1922 Snapshot of James Joyce’s Library,” The Modernist Review, issue 43, October 2022. https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2022/11/04/reading-through-the-canon-a-1922-snapshot-of-james-joyces-library/.

Book Reviews:

• “Genetic Joyce: Manuscripts and the Dynamics of Creation, by Daniel Ferrer,” James Joyce Quarterly62, no. 2 (2025): 438–442. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2025.a978574.
• “The Reader’s Joyce: Ulysses, Authorship and the Authority of the Reader by Sophie Corser,” The Modernist Review, issue 46, May 2023. https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/book-review-the-readers-joyce-ulysses-authorship-and-the-authority-of-the-reader/.