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School of English

Staff Profile of Dr Zoe Skoulding

Name:

Dr Zoe Skoulding

Position:

AHRC Research Fellow

Email:

Location:

New Arts 338

Phone:

2257

Enjoys teaching

Creative writing and contemporary literature, and the interface between critical and creative practice. 

Research profile

My critical research has developed from my creative practice as a poet and is closely related to it. The synergy between these areas informed my PhD thesis (2005) and is central to my current work as AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts.

I see writing and performance as a means of discovering and rethinking the ways in which place and identity are constructed and experienced, rather than simply as an outcome or recording of such knowledge.  Much of my recent work has centred on the idea of the city as a mobile, changing space that shapes and is shaped by language. Although I write in English, the nature of Bangor as a bilingual city has been an important influence, as have the layered histories of other European cities.

Working with others, I perform poetry with field recordings as an exploration of relationships between language and the physical environment. I have also collaborated on cross-media performances of poetry and experimental music for several international festivals. I am interested in how all forms of collaboration can be ways of understanding how the self is constructed in relation to the other, including surrounding landscapes and cultures.

As a development of the ideas in my poems, I have become interested in how language and subjectivity in contemporary poetry and poetics, particularly that written by women, relate to urban spaces. I am looking at connections between feminist poetics and geography to see how women writers negotiate a place within the city and within a language. My current critical research involves the following questions: why do women poets tend to write about the city less often, or less directly, than men? What is the role of gender in the construction of city space?  How far does the globalized city give rise to paradoxical relationships with language, culture and political structures, and how might these be relevant to women writers?