current and former Postgraduate Associates of the Centre for Travel Writing Studies

The CTWS is proud to supervise and support a wide variety of postgraduate research on travel writing. We welcome inquiries and applications from prospective candidates interested in studying with us. Meet some of our current and previous research degree candidates and find out more about their research below.
Sofia Aatkar was an AHRC and M3C-funded PhD student who was awarded her doctorate by NTU in 2020 for a thesis 'Caribbean-British Travel Writing, 1958-2018'. Her research focused on Caribbean-British travel narratives and she was particularly interested in how (and to what extent) Caribbean travel writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Ferdinand Dennis, and Amryl Johnson offer a response to Eurocentric ideas of travel. Sofia co-edited an anthology of travel writing called Caribbean Journeys (2018), which was one output of a community-led project she coordinated in collaboration with Kelsi Delaney and The National Caribbean Heritage Museum. She was also the co-director of the network New Voices in Postcolonial Studies. Sofia co-organised with Tim Hannigan the Borders and Crossings conference at the University of Leicester in July 2019 and co-edited with him a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing (24, 2, 2020) featuring articles based on selected papers from that event. Her article on 'Postcolonial flânerie in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound and Ferdinand Dennis’s Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain' was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56, 1 (2020), 30-42. She now works for Pom Pom Publishing, a knitting and crochet publication based in London.
Alex Brigham is an MRes candidate interested in the relationship between postcolonial and travel writing studies. With a focus on predominantly Nigerian travel literature, he plans to work with existing scholarship to expand the scope of what we understand travel writing to be. By reading texts written within the British-Nigerian diaspora, and texts written by Nigerian authors too, Alex is aiming to understand the vast body of travel literature which exists beyond the established Western tradition, and what this means for the genre. As well as looking to the past, Alex is examining how Nigerian travel blogs are contributing to a shift in the way tourism and travel are conducted on the African continent.
Rebecca Bruce became a member of the Centre in 2020 when she began her PhD thesis. Her research focuses on the travels of the ancient Egyptian mummy, and how the mummy is perceived and treated by ninteenth-century travel writers during their expeditions to Egypt. Rebecca is particularly interested in the intersection of travel writing in Egypt and the "Egyptomania" phase in Britain, focusing on the unethical treatment of the mummy. She has published reviews in the Journal of Gender Studies and the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and has a chapter titled, "Unlawful Acts and Supernatural Curses: The Fictional Traveller in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903)", published in Pilgrims, Discerning Travellers, Curious Tourists: Changing Patterns of Travel to the Middle East from Medieval to Modern Times (Archaeopress, 2020). Rebecca is also the co-founder and co-chair of ISSE, the International Society of the Study of Egyptomania (est.2021). She edits Snapshot Traveller, a travel studies newsletter, published by the Centre, available elsewhere on this site.
Becky Cullen was an AHRC Midlands3Cities PhD candidate in Creative Writing and English. She was awarded her doctorate by NTU in 2018 for her creative and critical thesis, 'Mastering Time: Time and Temporality in Contemporary Poetry', which looked at the ways that a poem is in dynamic movement, travelling between temporalities of past, present and future. During her PhD, Becky was AHRC/Midlands3Cities Poet-in-Residence at Newstead Abbey, former home of the poet and traveller Lord Byron. Becky is writing a collection of her own poetry and a critical work which discusses the connections between poetry and the repetition of time, the way that poetry stratifies time, and poetry and the disturbance of time. She is currently Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent, where she manages the WRAP – Writing, Reading and Pleasure programme.
Olivia Foster's doctoral research reconsiders nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry produced from positions of reclusiveness, transnationalism, and activism, showing how authors’ actual or imagined travels are translated into poetic form. Olivia's thesis will be applying ecocritical theory to the analysis of body, land, built, and water-based environments in the poetry of Sarah Piatt, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. She aims to show how her selected poets are united in creating narratives that depart from the idealised closeness associated with women and nature and promote a social consciousness in which there is a stewardship of place.
​Geoff Geis was an AHRC M3C funded PhD student in creative writing at the University of Birmingham co-supervised from NTU.  He was warded his doctorate in 2021 for his thesis ‘Desert voices: A Poetics of the Postcolonial-Colonial Novel’, which consisted of a novel set in the Sahara desert during the colonial period and a critical reflection on some of the problems of representation invoked by the creative work. These include the ways that western perspectives, which frequently construct the desert as empty and timeless, as a terrain lacking in intrinsic value or one of escape from the dissatisfactions and constraints of western living, might be set alongside and challenged by indigenous ‘voices’. The thesis explored how contrasting perceptions of desert time, space, movement and cultural belonging might be woven together in a single text to create what Bakhtin calls a ‘polyphonic’ or multi-voiced novel. In addition, the research considered questions of the ethical and political issues invoked when writing about other cultures and representing the voice of ‘the other’ and, conversely, the implications of ignoring this voice. While these problems have no easy solutions, the aim was to work within but also interrogate the tradition of Saharan writing in fruitful ways, going beyond literary pastiche and drawing on postcolonial texts and insights toward a critically engaged final work. 
Juliet Gryspeerdt was a PhD student in Spanish and Portuguese studies at the University of Nottingham, with co-supervision from NTU. She was awarded a PhD in 2020 for a thesis on ‘Representations of Al-Andalus and Arab-Islamic legacy in travel and regionalist writing of southern Spain and Portugal’. Her doctoral research investigated the memory of the medieval Islamic presence in the south-west of the Iberian Peninsula. Whereas al-Andalus tends to be associated exclusively with Spain in the European consciousness, it also encompassed southern Portugal until the twelfth century. Juliet is interested in how (late) modern writers have approached this marginalised heritage, in particular their use of an imaginative engagement with place to represent the period and recuperate the memory of these forgotten west-Iberian Muslims. Her project looked firstly at a corpus of travel writing on Portugal from 1780 to 1980, written in English, French and Portuguese. This part of her research also included a comparative study with nineteenth-century travel writing on Spain. Her second line of enquiry involved examining the links between travel writing and related historical fiction that takes medieval Islamic Portugal as its subject.
Tim Hannigan was an AHRC Midlands3Cities PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, co-supervised from NTU. His thesis, “Journeys in Search of Travel Writing: A Creative-Critical Interrogation of Travel Writing as a Genre”, was an investigation of modern travel literature, with a particular focus on ethical issues, written in the form of a travel book. A version of it was publoished by Hurst in 2021 and has been widely reviewed and acclaimed. The project involved interviews with notable travel writers, and a self-reflexive examination of travel writing practice. Tim is an experienced professional travel writer, having worked on numerous guidebooks and newspaper and magazine travel features. He is also the author of three books of narrative history: Murder in the Hindu Kush (2011), which was shortlisted for the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature; Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (2012), which won the John Brooks Award; and A Brief History of Indonesia (2015).
Jean Morris is a PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her project reimagines the migratory journey made by a female ancestor across the Mediterranean, from the Iberian peninsula, in 1492. The journey also explores migratory phenomenon through diverse theoretical discourses. The thesis is presented as a collection of intersecting essays and the narrative blends fact, fiction and biography using both  historical and contemporary sources. Themes include: radicalisation, forced migration, border-crossing, detainment and the lure of ‘promised’ lands. Her PhD is funded by the Vice Chancellor's Research Development Scheme.

Before pursuing a PhD, Jean worked in the publishing industry as an editor, commissioning fiction for children and young adults. Alongside this, she was tutor and lecturer at the School of Communication Arts and has taught Creative Writing at various youth projects in London.
Jenny Owen (published as Jenny Walker) was awarded her PhD from NTU in 2020 for a thesis on 'A Barren Legacy: The Arabian Desert as Orientalist Trope in English Travel Writing, post-Thesiger', which she is currently revising for publication in the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series. Arguing that the desert is often used as a tabula rasa upon which to project a complexity of ideas connected with ‘home’ rather than ‘abroad’, Jenny’s PhD placed desert travel in the wider discourse framing the region. The study surveyed the main themes in the history of desert travel literature, examined the phenomenon of so-called footstep journeys, traced the distinction between desert and sown, explored gender issues in wilderness literature, and considered the role guidebooks play in the commercialisation and democratisation of modern desert travel. Jenny has written widely on the Middle East in twenty Lonely Planet guidebooks and her articles have appeared in Wanderlust, the Observer and the National Geographic. She co-authored an off-road guide to Oman, is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild.
Ramisha Rafique’s current creative-critical doctoral project, 'The ontology of the British Muslim Flâneuse: Decolonisation in British Muslim women's writing', explores the ontology of the Postcolonial Flâneuse through a close examination of British Muslim women’s writing. Her research interests include: The Flâneuse, Postcolonial writing, decolonisation, British Muslim women’s writing, travel writing, and Islamophobia. For the creative component of her thesis, she will produce a pamphlet length body of travel poetry and vignettes that engage with poetic form, language, and place. She is also interested in the effects of the pandemic on travel writing and in how or to what extent social media/online spaces influence the ‘Postcolonial Flâneuse’.
Tony Robinson-Smith was awarded his PhD by NTU in 2016 for his thesis, 'The Dragon Run, A Journey across Bhutan'. The creative part of the thesis recounted the two years Tony spent teaching in - and running across - the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, while the critical part examined the construction of the narrator in more introspective contemporary travel narratives. His book The Dragon Run was published by the University of Alberta Press in 2017. Tony is also the author of Back in 6 Years: A Journey around the Planet without Leaving the Surface (New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 2008)
Aly Stoneman was a Midlands3Cities AHRC-funded Doctoral Researcher at Nottingham Trent University. She was awarded her PhD by NTU in 2021 for a practice-led investigation of British contemporary poetry, sea-level rise and coastal flooding. She is the Poetry Editor at LeftLion Magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing. A winner of the Buxton Poetry Prize (2015), in 2016 she was a commissioned poet for The Observatory at National Trust Mottisfont and Guardian Award-winning project Dawn of the Unread and has read and performed her work at many events including Copenhagen International Poetry Festival and Ledbury Poetry Festival. Lost Lands, her debut pamphlet, was published by Crystal Clear Creators in 2012. Aly's research included visits to settlements and heritage sites on the British coast that are vulnerable to coastal change. For more information about Aly's work visit www.alystoneman.co.uk.
Amy Williams was an AHRC Midlands3Cities PhD candidate in History. Her doctoral thesis ‘The Memory of the Kindertransports in National and International Perspectives' offered the first comprehensive examination of the different national and international memories of the Kindertransport. In analysing 'Kindertransport', she considered not just the actual rescue of Jewish children from Nazism (1938-1939), but also its effects, i.e. transplantation to a new and strange environment, with all the ensuing complications of adaptation and integration. Amy’s undergraduate and Master's research focussed primarily on British memory of the Kindertransports, demonstrating a late re-emergence of interest in this event in the 1980s and how this historical event is represented in fiction. However, her PhD project branched out from the British narrative to reveal stories of the Kindertransport in other host nations (Sweden, Belgium, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), which are not as explored or recognised as the British story of this event. A comparison of these various host countries revealed that memory of the Kindertransports was not uniform, but shaped by national factors such as the role of these countries in the war, their post-war political, economic and social development, social and cultural policies towards refugees, and nationally conditioned memory discourses.