Dr Julia Dallaway

Dr Julia Dallaway is an early-career researcher in life-writing studies. She recently completed her DPhil English degree at the University of Oxford, with a thesis entitled 'The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion'. Her doctoral thesis explored the rise of the literary essay as a prevalent life-writing form across the twentieth century, with particular attention to the ways in which the formal characteristics of the essay—such as its associative connections, fragmentary structure, and inconclusiveness—were in dialogue with contemporaneous developments in psychological memory studies. She is currently adapting her thesis into a monograph, as well as writing a journal article on literary essays about migraines and preparing for a postdoctoral research project on late modernist life-writing texts that use place, rather than time, as their primary organising structure.

Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the edited collections Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2025) and Tramps: Remaking Contemporary Irish Fiction. She also writes book reviews for outlets including the Times Literary Supplement, the Oxonian Review, Modernism/modernity, and Critical Quarterly. She has presented her work at national and international conferences—including the International Auto/Biography Association Europe Conference and the British Association for Modernist Studies Conference—and was formerly a Reader for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.