Chelsea Wallis

Chelsea Wallis is a doctoral student at the University of Sydney. She researches epistolary networks amongst women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring how female friendship provided a forum in which to construct an authorial persona and derive a perception of literary legitimacy within a patriarchal publishing context. Focussing on the archives of letters exchanged by Charlotte Brontë and Mary Taylor; Miles Franklin and Alice Henry; Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield; Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau; Mary Shelley and Margaret Mason; and Amy Levy and Vernon Lee, Chelsea considers how these literary partnerships contributed to the formation of feminist literary communities.

Alongside her doctorate in English, Chelsea is also completing a DPhil in Law at Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), considering the human rights dimensions of domestic abuse and applying an intersectional, relational analysis to the experiences of indigenous Australian communities and women with disabilities and neurodiversity in the UK. She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Law Faculty, a member of the Oxford Human Rights Hub editorial board, and has worked as Research Assistant to Dr Naomi Lott, Prof Jonathan Herring, Assoc Prof Barbara Havelková, and Prof Sandy Fredman. Outside of her studies, Chelsea is a writer and received the DL Chapman prize for her poetry collection Apricity in 2021.