Niamh Gordon

For teaching: niamh.gordon@glasgow.ac.uk

For research: n.gordon.2@research.gla.ac.uk

Research title: Narrating grief: trauma and the disruption of time and form.

Research Summary

“Narrating grief: trauma and the disruption of time and form”

My research is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationships between narrative, time, and trauma: primarily, it’s a practice-based exploration of the impact of bereavement by suicide on narrative time, examining how it transforms temporal experience within fictional and non-fictional narratives. I am aiming to create new ways of representing the disruptive temporal aspect of grief, and develop a theoretical approach for understanding its potential effect on narrative structure and time.

Primary research strands:

- Fiction project: representations of bereavement by suicide and the ethical and philosophical problems suicide poses to fiction writing, through the writing of a novel

- Creative non-fiction project: experimental essays on how bereavement by suicide disrupts existing narratives of self and selfhood, speaking across the creative-critical boundary and tracking the lived experience research process from an autoethnographic perspective

- Narratological enquiry: academic essay on how grief functions as a disruptive narrative device within contemporary Scottish novelist and essayist Ali Smith’s writings

Publications

Supervisors

Grants

  • SGSAH AHRC DTP Scholarship 2020-2024 
  • Graduate Student International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference award 2021

Conference

  • "something from something: erasure poetry, writing trauma, and creative practice as research", University of Glasgow College of Arts Postgraduate Conference, June 2021
  • "Traumatic grief as a disruptive narrative device", International Conference on Narrative, May 2021
  • "Grief made visible: experiments in narrative form through creative practice", Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research 4th Annual Congress, April 2021

Teaching

Semester 1

  • GTA 1A Poetry and Poetics

Semester 2

  • CW Experimental writing: time, space and form

Additional Information