General

BA (Witwatersrand); M.Phil, D.Phil (Oxford University).

Research interests

Modernism in its cultural, historical and geographical contexts. More broadly, late 19th, 20th and 21st century writing, with a particular focus on the modernist moment and its legacies. Her book, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, situates Plath’s poetry and prose in relation to modernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and Cold War culture. She has also published articles on a wide range of twentieth-century authors.

Proposals for doctoral work in any of these areas of interest, and particularly on modernism, are welcome.

Selected Publications

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford University Press, 1999).

'Varieties: Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot and Cosmopolitan Performance', Op Cit: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies 2 (2013).

'"The Strange High Singing of Some Aeroplane Overhead': War, Utopia and the Everyday in Virginia Woolf's Fiction' in Benjamin Kohlmann and Rosalyn Gregory (eds) Utopian Spaces of Modernism: Literature and Culture, 1885-1945 (Palgrave 2011), 121-40.

'Making Modernism Safe for Democracy: The Dial (1920-1929)' in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol.2 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011).

''This Way to the Exhibition': Genealogies of Urban Spectacle in Jean Rhys's Interwar Fiction', Textual Practice 21 (3), 2007, 457-82

‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Literary Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford’, Journal of Modern Literature, 29.1 (2005), pp.1-20. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_literature/v029/29.1britzolakis.html

Recent Plenaries, Keynote Addresses and Invited Talks

'Jean Rhys's Other Empires', Plenary, Reading Jean Rhys, King's College London, 8 July 2010

'William Carlos Williams and Medicine', International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine, Warwick University, April 2010.

'Modernist Collaboration as a Utopian Project'', Modernism and Utopia Conference, University of Birmingham, April 2010.

'Woolf and the Utopia of Everyday Life', Utopian Spaces of Literature and Culture, University of Oxford, September 2009.

'T.S. Eliot, the 'Mind of Europe' and the Russian Revolution', Modernist Studies Association Conference, Montreal, November 2009.

'The Dial and Cosmopolitanism', Modernist Magazines Conference, Sussex University, July 2009.

'Sylvia Plath's Dreamwork', Keynote Address, 75th Anniversary Sylvia Plath Conference, University of Oxford, October 2008.

'Making Modernism Safe for Democracy: The Dial', Modernist Magazines Conference, De Montfort University, July 2008.

 

Teaching

Modules taught in past years include:

EN928 Poetics of Urban Modernism

EN268 Modernist Cultures

EN248 Modern American Poetry

PH304 Textual Studies (Philosophy and Literature)

Membership of Professional Associations

Modernist Studies Association

British Association of Modernist Studies

 

Associate Professor

H508; email