Dr Rose Harris-Birtill

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill

Honorary Senior Lecturer

Researcher profile

Email
rhb8@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Teaching

Academic teaching experience includes:

Masters dissertation supervision. Includes MLitt dissertation supervision on post-secular literature, examining the influence of Tolkien and Le Guin on the contemporary fantasy genre.

EN5511 Theorising the Contemporary. Designed and delivered lecture and seminar content on defining the contemporary for Masters students, teaching critical theory including Agamben, Casanova, Moretti and Spivak, critiquing interdisciplinary perspectives on artistic periodization and discussing the Anthropocene’s impact on contemporary culture. 

EN4406 Contemporary Fiction. Guest lecturer for final year undergraduate Honours students, designing and delivering a lecture on David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and globalisation theory, assisting with module design by providing recommended primary and secondary reading, and setting discussion questions for student presentations. 

CS4303 Video Games (St Andrews) and AC31009 Games Programming (Dundee). Designed and delivered third year and final year Honours lectures on Narratology for Video Games for video game software developers as an invited lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, and at the School of Computing, University of Dundee.

International Summer Programme Lectures, St Andrews and Oxford. Lecturer on Jekyll and Hyde for 16-18 year-olds, designing and delivering a lecture series on the global cultural legacy of this story on stage and screen since the nineteenth century, University of St Andrews. I have also given these talks as an invited lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford.

International Education Institute, University of St Andrews. Tutor on the interdisciplinary Academic Induction pre-sessional course for first-year undergraduates, assessing presentations and essays, and providing one-to-one feedback tutorials on public speaking and essay writing. 

EN3214 The Country and the City in Scottish Literature. Guest lecturer and module assistant for undergraduate Honours students, designing and delivering a lecture on Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon and the panoptic legacy from Bentham to Foucault, assisting with module design and administration, selecting a core text, and planning student reading and questions. 

EN1003 Culture and Conflict: An Introduction to Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature. Designed and delivered seminars for first year undergraduates, providing essay feedback and marking assessments, and teaching texts by T.S. Eliot, Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and more. 

EN2004 Drama: Reading and Performance. Designed and delivered second-year seminars, providing essay feedback and marking assessments, teaching plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Liz Lochhead and more. 

EN4406 Contemporary British Fiction. Teaching assistant for final year undergraduate Honours students. Co-taught seminars on David Mitchell’s works, supervising small groups, generating discussion and providing feedback.

Research areas

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews and Editorial Director of the Open Library of Humanities, a diamond open access academic publisher. Her academic monograph, David Mitchell's Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion (2019, Bloomsbury Academic, 125,000 words) brings together post-secular literary fiction and Buddhist philosophies, investigating the redeployment of Buddhist influences across the complete fictions of author David Mitchell. This study also broadens to investigate a wider resurgence of post-secular narrative worlds in contemporary literature, discussing Mitchell’s works alongside those of Michael Ondaatje, Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Will Self and Margaret Atwood.

Rose’s research interests include contemporary and twentieth-century literatures and poetics, open acccess publishing, time, globalisation, experimental and visual narratives, digital storytelling, Tibetan Buddhism and diaspora, world literature, global feminisms, literature in performance, speculative fiction, and critical and cultural theory.

Rose is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), an accredited Masters-level professional teaching qualification awarded at the University of St Andrews, aligning with the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). She also holds the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) New Scholar Prize, the Frank Muir Prize for Writing, and a McCall MacBain Teaching Excellence Award. Rose has also served as the Secretary for the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, and is the current UK National Expert for the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS).

Rose also served as the lead organiser for the David Mitchell Conference 2017, a one-day international conference on the author's works that was held at the University of St Andrews on Saturday 3rd June 2017. See the David Mitchell Conference website for full details.

Selected publications

 

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