• Associate Professor in Department of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University

Tory is an Associate Professor of English Literature, Course Leader for the MA: English Literature. She teaches 20th and 21st-century literature and has additional research interests in feminist and queer theories of narrative, life-writing, Writing and Wellbeing, and Writing in the Disciplines.

Since completing her PhD on Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf in 1996, Tory's research in modernism has focused on women writers including Nancy Cunard, Hope Mirrlees and Jean Rhys. She held the first conference on Nancy Cunard at Anglia Ruskin in 2001, and co-organised the first on Jean Rhys in 2010.

More recently, Tory has written on contemporary writers, especially those who have engaged with modernism, such as Ali Smith and Colm Tóibín. In 2013, she received a small grant from the British Academy to begin a project on The Future of Feminist Narratology, on which she organised a symposium in October 2013. This led to a special edition of Textual Practice with an introduction: "Futures for Feminist and Queer Narratology" and an essay "Invisibility and Power in the Digital Age: Issues for Feminist and Queer Narratology", which has also been published as a book: Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative (Routledge, 2021).

Tory's upcoming projects are about ageing, intergenerational friendships, writing and wellbeing, the relationship between immersion and literary form. She regularly interviews authors at Waterstones in Cambridge (including Nick Bradley, Annie Garthwaite, Anna Hope, Gill Hornby, Deborah Levy, Elvin James Mensah, Sarah Moss, and Libby Page).

September 2021 saw the start of A Life Written, a collaborative project for Older People with the National Centre for Writing. You can watch a short film made by one of the participants on YouTube. In subsequent iterations of A Life Written, students from ARU have written moving responses to the work of the elders.

Tory's interest in student writing and academic literacies has run parallel with and is informed by her research into literature. She was a co-director of the HEFCE-funded Speak-Write Project at Anglia Ruskin University, and in 2008 wrote Studying English Literature: A Practical Guide. This book is used in North America, Asia and across the UK as a set text for first-year undergraduate literature students.

She is a Senior Fellow of the HEA, and has supervised eight PhDs to completion (including two creative writing projects). Her current supervisory projects include the VC funded PhD into Writing and Wellbeing.

• –present Associate Professor, Anglia Ruskin University

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