Who's who

BA(Hons) English and History of Art; MA Literary Studies; Doctorate in Literary Theory

Academic interests

Kym Martindale gained a master's degree in Literary Studies from University of the West of England in 1996 and went on to gain a doctorate in literary theory from the University of Gloucestershire in 2000. She has taught in both the creative and academic spheres at Bath Spa University, University of Gloucestershire, University of Bristol, and for the Open University, before coming to University College Falmouth in 2003.

She has published a small collection of poetry, in 2000, as winner of the Redbeck Poetry Prize, and in 2004, was a Hawthornden Fellow; she is currently supervising two practice-led PhDs in creative writing, place and landscape, and industrial heritage.

Her initial academic interests lay in gender and queer theory, but she has since sought to extend the definition of ‘queer' beyond the limits of gender to rethink boundary as threshold, and is especially interested in the way in which the material and the non-corporeal intersect; this strand of thought has inflected her readings of Alice Oswald and Zoë Skoulding's poetry.

She has given several papers and lectures on the functions of place and faith in the poetry of Frances Bellerby and Jack Clemo, is recently published on Alice Oswald, and is currently preparing a further essay on body and form in Oswald's poetry, to be included in a collection of essays on identity and form. Further to this, Dr Martindale is co-editing Soundings: Critical Essays on Alice Oswald, preparing a monograph on Clemo and Bellerby (Perfections of Design: Faith, Place and Self in the Work of Frances Bellerby and Jack Clemo), and working with colleagues from University of Plymouth to promote the work of Charles Causley, as both poet and hub of a creative community that extended beyond Cornwall, through publication and an international conference planned for 2013.

She was on the panel of judges for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Writing for 2009 and 2010,and recently collaborated with colleagues from Cultural Geography, University of Exeter, on a creative writing project (Climate to Landscape: Imagined Futures CLIF).

Recent outputs

Book chapters

• '"She do the river in different voices": Lyric Democracies in Alice Oswald's Dart', in Text, Landscape, and Identity. Ed. Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra. Spatial Practices Series. Amsterdam: Rodopi, September 2010

Papers

• Presentation of student work in response to climate change, with students from English with Media Studies. Environmental Change - Cultural Change, University of Bath, 1-4 September 2010 (This work is part of the UoE collaboration CLIF.)
• 'Elizabeth Carne and Caroline Fox: The Women of Cornwall's Scientific Revolution' with Dr Adeline Johns-Putra of University of Exeter, Daphne du Maurier Festival, 12 May 2010 (and in 2009)
• '"Good secretaryship": Frances Bellerby's Truth in Place and Nature', Dept. of English Research Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, 26 January 2010
• '"I need a map to know where I am/not": Beating the Boundaries in the Poetry of Alice Oswald and Zoë Skoulding' New Grounds: Ecocriticism, Globalization and Cultural Memory, University of Nijmegen, Netherlands,13-15 January 2010
• 'Not yet not yet...' Forms of Defiance in Alice Oswald's Poetry' Identity and Form University Sheffield Hallam, 3-4 July 2009
• 'Hearing Differently, Seeing Through: The Function of Isolation in the poetry of Frances Bellerby and Jack Clemo', Poetry and Belief Conference, University of Central Lancashire, 24-25 April 2009
• 'The Life (Not) Written: Poetry vs Autobiography in the work of Frances Bellerby', Research Seminar series, University College Falmouth, 21 January 2009

Selected earlier outputs

Refereed journal article

• 'Author(iz)ing the Body: Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body and the Anatomy Texts of Andreas Vesalius', European Journal of Women's Studies, 8.3 (2001), 343-358

Poetry

• Jujubes and Aspirins, Redbeck Press 2000
• Various commissions for the International Festival of Mountaineering Literature between 1990-2000

Current projects/forthcoming outputs

• '"Not yet not yet": Forms of Defiance in Alice Oswald' in Identity and Form: Essays/Proceedings from Conference: Identity and Form University Sheffield Hallam, July 2009. Ed. Ana Maria Sanchez (in progress)
• 'Soundings: Critical Essays on Alice Oswald' (as co-editor and contributor)

Membership of learned societies, subject associations

Association of Literature and Environment ASLE

External examiner

MPhil in Creative Writing, University of Glamorgan

Contact