Dr Emma Parker (SFHEA)

I am a Reader/Associate Professor in Postwar and Contemporary Literature, focusing on women’s writing, queer literature, gender and sexuality. I also work on the playwright Joe Orton.

I was Co-Editor (with Professor Suzanne Keen) of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press), 2012-2017, winner of the of Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Award for Best New Journal (2009). The exhibition ‘Punk: Rage and Revolution’ (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, 2023), which drew on my research, won the National Lottery England Project of the Year Award. I was shortlisted for a University of Leicester Citizens’ Award for Impact (2023) and have been the recipient of a University of Leicester Student Voice Award for Best Personal Tutor (2019), the University of Leicester Discovering Excellence Award for Equalities Champion (2018),  the East Midlands Women’s Award for Arts, Media and Music (2018) and a Saboteur Award (2018) for my project https://www.ednawelthorpe.le.ac.uk/. I have appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programmes 'Today', 'Front Row' and 'Woman's Hour'.

I research postwar and contemporary literature, focusing on gender, sexuality, feminism and queer. My work centres on contemporary women's writing and I have published on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Kate Atkinson, Sarah Waters and Rose Tremain, amongst others. Another strong interest is literary representations of Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s, reflected in essays on Martin Amis, Will Self, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson. 

I am also an expert on the playwright Joe Orton. I produced a 50th anniversary edition of Entertaining Mr Sloane (2014), and have published essays on Orton and Shakespeare, Orton and music, and Orton and Leicester. I led the AHRC and Arts Council-funded project Joe Orton: 50 Years On (2014-2020), which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Orton's three major plays and his death in 1967. This includes Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs), a collaboration with film-maker Chris Shepherd, which won a Saboteur Award. I recorded the commentary for the North American Blu-Ray of Entertaining Mr Sloane (with Nathaniel Thompson, Severin Films, 2025). 

I have given talks on Orton at The British Library, Tate Britain and The Postal Museum (London), the LGBTQ+ festival Homotopia (Liverpool) and Latitude Festival and I have interviewed the following writers, actors and directors about Orton: Alec Baldwin, Frances Barber, Kenneth Cranham, Dudley Sutton, Jake Arnott, Graham Fellows (aka John Shuttleworth), Braham Murray, Michael Elwyn and Nick Bagnall.

I run an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition and, working with Let's Ride, I lead Joe Orton and Sue Townsend bike tours of Leicester.

I am currently writing a book titled Joe Orton and the Queer Art of Offence. 

Exhibitions

I have contributed to several exhibitions:

• Contributor and Ambassador, ‘Punk: Rage and Revolution’, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, 27 May - 3 September, 2023, winner of the National Lottery England Project of the Year Award and a Leicestershire Tourism Award. https://rageandrevolution.co.uk/
• Consultant, ‘Mind the Gap: LGBT Mental Health’, Beautiful Distress House, Amsterdam, 10 March – 21 May, 2023. https://www.beautifuldistress.org/blog/mind-the-gap-en
• Co-curator, 'What the Artist Saw: Art Inspired by the Life and Work of Joe Orton' (with Michael Petry), Museum of Contemporary Art, London (5 February - 4 March 2017) and New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester (29 July - 22 October 2017) http://www.moca.london/what-the-artist-saw.html
• Co-curator, ‘Crimes of Passion: The Story of Joe Orton’ (with Bev Baker), National Justice Museum, Nottingham (22 July - 1 October 2017). Special Commendation, Nottinghamshire Heritage Awards. 

1. Co-editor, with Mary Eagleton, The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present (Palgrave, 2015).
2. Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, 50th anniversary edition (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014).
3. Guest Editor, Textual Practice 25.4 (August 2011), special issue on Contemporary Women's Writing and Queer Diasporas.
4. Guest Editor, Contemporary Women's Writing 3.1 (June 2009), special issue on Diaspora.
5. Editor, Contemporary British Women Writers. Essays and Studies Vol. 56. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004).
6. Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader's Guide (London: Continuum, 2002).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

1. 'Joe Orton and Leicester: The Literary City and Heritage Culture', forthcoming English (2025).
2. ‘Heart in the Right Place: Thatcherism and Love in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 16.3 (2022), pp. 305-323.
3. 'A Comedy of Horrors: Thatcherism in What a Carve Up!' in Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire, ed Philip Tew (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 67-79
4. 'Joe Orton and Shakespeare: Collage, Class and Queerness', Studies in Theatre and Performance, special issue on Joe Orton, 37.2, Summer 2017, pp. 237-268.
5. 'A Queer Ear: Joe Orton and Music’, Art & Music, Spring 2017, no. 37 special issue: The Life and Times of Joe Orton, pp. 44-48
6. 'Queers, Gals, Chaps, Chicks, and Lads' in The Oxford History of the Novel, Vol. 7, British and Irish Fiction Since 1940, eds. Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 328-346
7. 'Re-Envisioning Feminist Fiction' in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 79-94
8. 'Contemporary Lesbian Fiction: Into the Twenty-First Century' in The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodi Medd (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 204-218
9. 'Introduction' (co-authored with Mary Eagleton), The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present (Palgrave, 2015), pp. 1-20
10. 'Male Pregnancy and Queer Utopia in Paul Magrs's Could it be Magic?', Textual Practice 28.6 (2014), pp. 1035-1056
11. 'Introduction', Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014), pp. 1-25
12. 'An Interview with Nick Bagnall', Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014), pp. 27-33
13. ‘The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger’ in Sarah Waters, ed. Kaye Mitchell (Bloomsbury, 2013), 99-113. Reprinted in 'Sarah Waters', Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 400, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Detroit: Gale, 2016), 299-307.
14. 'Kicks Against the Pricks: Gender, Sex and Satire in Will Self's Cock and Bull', English 60.230 (Autumn 2011), 229-250.
15. 'Queer, There and Everywhere', introduction to special issue on Contemporary Women's Writing and Queer Diasporas, Textual Practice 25.4 (August 2011), 639-647.
16. 'Magic, Diaspora and Klezbian Desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist', Textual Practice 25.4 (August 2011), 689-710. Reprinted in Judith Katz, The Escape Artist (Ann Arbor: Bywater Books, 2013), 289-314.
17. 'Odd Girl Out: An Interview with Valerie Mason-John', Textual Practice 25.4 (August 2011), 799-822.
18. 'On Fiction, Femininity, and Fashion: An Interview with Linda Grant', Feminist Review 95 (2010), 127-134.
19. 'An Interview with Linda Grant', Wasafiri 24.1, special issue on Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas (Spring 2009), 27-32. Included in ‘the best of Wasafiri’, published free online to celebrate the journal’s 25^th anniversary.
20. ‘Recovering Women: History, Trauma and Gender in Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 2.2 (2008), 111-130.
21. 'Michèle Roberts and Romance', Women: A Cultural Review 19.1 (Spring 2008), 21-36.
22. ‘The Real Thing: Transsexuality and Manhood in Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country’, Women: A Cultural Review 18.3 (Winter 2007), 303-326.
23. ‘Sex Changes: The Politics of Pleasure in the Fiction of Michèle Roberts’, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, special issue on Contemporary British Women Writers, 17. 3-4 (December 2006), 325-351.
24. ‘Money Makes the Man: Gender and Sexuality in Martin Amis’ Money’ in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks (Palgrave, 2006), 55-75.
25. ‘Lost in Translation: Gender and the Figure of the Narrator in Contemporary Queer Fiction’ in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor (Studies in European Cultural Transition), ed. Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini (Ashgate, 2005), 118-125.
26. 'The Proper Stuff of Fiction: Defending the Domestic, Reappraising the Parochial' in Emma Parker ed. Contemporary British Women Writers (English Association, 2004), 1-15.
27. ‘No Man’s Land: Masculinity, Class and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders’, in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature, ed. Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene (Rodopi, 2003), 89-104.
28. ‘A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, Twentieth-Century Literature 47.1 (Spring 2001), 1-19.
29. ‘The Consumption of Angela Carter: Women, Food and Power’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 31. 3 (July 2000): 141-169. Reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism vol.139, Sept, 2003.
30. ‘You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood’ in Margaret Atwood (Modern Critical Views), ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 2000), 113-130. Reprinted from Twentieth Century Literature 41:3 (Fall 1995), 349-368. Extract also reprinted in Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 4, ‘20^th Century, Topics’, ed. Jessica Bomarito and Jeffrey W. Hunter (Detroit: Gale, 2005), 115.
31. ‘From House to Home: A Kristevan Reading of Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41.2 (Winter 1999/2000), 153-173.
32. ‘A Career of One’s Own: Christina Rossetti, Literary Success and Love’, Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998), 305-328. Reprinted in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism vol. 186, November 2007.
33. ‘Apple Pie Ideology and the Politics of Appetite in the Novels of Toni Morrison’, Contemporary Literature 39.4 (Winter 1998), 614-643.

I have externally examined 11 PhDs: Brunel, 2020; Melbourne, 2019; Southampton, Edinburgh, Cardiff, 2016; Durham, 2012; Stirling, 2011; Swansea, 2010 and 2008; Loughborough, 2007; and Sheffield Hallam, 2003.

I have supervised 12 PhD dissertations to successful completion on topics such as Experimental Women’s Life Writing, Doris Lessing, Sarah Waters, Margaret Walker, American women's science fiction, queer South Asian fiction, Biblical revisionism in contemporary women's writing, the single woman in the 1950s, women in Saudi Arabia and gender in comics.

Undergraduate

• EN1060 (Convenor) Feminist Fiction 
• EN2340 (Convenor) Contemporary Literature
• EN2060 Concepts in Criticism
• EN3144 (Convenor) The Thatcher Factor: The 1980s in Literature

Postgraduate

• EN7134 Queer Fiction

• BBC Radio 4 ‘Woman’s Hour’ on the 40th anniversary of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, 13 October, 2022
• BBC Radio 4 'Front Row' on 'A Queer Ear: Joe Orton and Music', 23 April 2019 (podcast, starting at 21:40)
• BBC Radio 4 'Front Row' special on Joe Orton, 11 August 2017
• Consultant, The Secret Diary of Sue Townsend (Aged 68 3/4), BBC Two, 15 October, 2016. Winner of the RTS Scotland award for best Documentary and Specialist Factual 2017
• BBC Radio 4 ‘Woman’s Hour’ on Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, 22 August, 2014
• BBC Radio 4 ‘Woman’s Hour’, on pregnant men, 4 August, 2009

• BA, University of Birmingham
• PhD, University of Birmingham
• Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy