Dr Julia Dallaway is an early-career researcher in life-writing studies. She recently completed her DPhil English degree at the University of Oxford, with a thesis entitled 'The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion'. Her doctoral thesis explored the rise of the literary essay as a prevalent life-writing form across the twentieth century, with particular attention to the ways in which the formal characteristics of the essay-such as its associative connections, fragmentary structure, and inconclusiveness-were in dialogue with contemporaneous developments in psychological memory studies. She is currently adapting her thesis into a monograph, as well as writing a journal article on literary essays about migraines and preparing for a postdoctoral research project on late modernist life-writing texts that use place, rather than time, as their primary organising structure.
Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the edited collections Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2025) and Tramps: Remaking Contemporary Irish Fiction. She also writes book reviews for outlets including the Times Literary Supplement, the Oxonian Review, Modernism/modernity, and Critical Quarterly. She has presented her work at national and international conferences-including the International Auto/Biography Association Europe Conference and the British Association for Modernist Studies Conference-and was formerly a Reader for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
