Isabella Shields - SGSAH Research

Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail.

The Featured Researcher for November 2025 is Dr Isabella Shields (she/her). Isabella is a writer, curator, and academic from Glasgow (b. 1995), and recently completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to gender and sexuality studies across all of her work — whether developing contemporary art exhibitions, creative writing projects, or academic research.

The title of her thesis is:

The Reparative Possibilities of Critique: Contemporary American Women’s Life-Writing and the Culture Wars

HEI: The University of Edinburgh

Supervisors:

Dr Paul Crosthwaite (Principal)
Dr Carole Jones (Secondary: 2020-2024)
Dr Alexandra Lawrie (Secondary: 2024-2025)

Below, Isabella gives a synopsis of her thesis and reflects on her research, her experiences as a doctoral researcher, and the lessons she has learned during this time.

My PhD thesis explored how contemporary American women writers use different types of personal storytelling within the genres of personal essays, autofiction, autotheory, and memoir to respond thoughtfully to intense public debates, especially those about gender, identity, and cultural values, often referred to as the ‘culture wars.’ A key idea in the thesis is that criticism (or ‘critique’) is not always negative or destructive by nature. Instead, it can be positive, protective, insightful, and help improve our understanding of our history, culture, and our present condition. The thesis pushes back against the idea that critique is by nature hostile or cynical and argues that it can also be reparative – i.e. that working out what isn’t productive and what is can help us navigate difficult issues and experiences. The thesis argues that this is inherently valuable and could allow for the evolution of cultural conversations that seem to be in a deadlock.

My PhD considered the works of Joan Didion, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, and Carmen Maria Machado, precisely because these writers mix personal experience with social commentary and academic theory, and their works offer critical models that are in some ways helpful and in some ways less helpful when thinking about some of the issues related to the culture wars. In working out what these texts are for and against, the thesis argues that constructive ways of thinking through ideas like freedom, solidarity, and accountability can come from complex discourses and self-conscious writing practices.

Each chapter focuses on a different author and shows how their work sheds light on how we could possibly respond to pressing social questions to do with literature, art, gender, and sexuality. This thesis also reflects on recent cultural moments like #MeToo, cancel culture, and debates around identity politics. It demonstrates how these writers’ works offer tools for thinking more carefully about how we represent others, tell stories about our own lives, and engage with political and personal truths.

Ultimately, the thesis defends the powers of literature and thoughtful critique, which is by nature reparative. It invites readers to see that nuanced situations deserve sensitive but principled responses, and that writing and reading carefully can help us move forward through cultural conflict.

What sparked your interest in this subject?

I feel like I haven’t really had a choice in being interested in discourses about gender and sexuality as a queer woman. I’ve long been fascinated by hybridity in literature, art, and film and I’m very happy that I’m able to work within the academic and culture sectors and spend so much time with texts and art that I love or feel challenged by. I’ve always been drawn towards American Studies because the US is such a hotbed for these discourses, with the pendulum swinging in such extreme ways decade to decade, and witnessing the US’s mutation from the romanticised, powerful, cultural titan I imagined it to be – or felt like it was when I was growing up – into this regressive, aggressive, and violent landscape made me even more interested in working in this field.

I’ve loved Joan Didion’s writing since I read ‘On Self-Respect’ as a teenager and I think her iconoclastic tendencies made a big impact on me. My interest in autotheory was sparked when Adam Benmakhlouf (a SGSAH scholar, close friend, and collaborator) gifted me Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts in 2014, around the same time I was studying I Love Dick by Chris Kraus at the University of Glasgow. Cultural conversations around these authors were and are so enthusiastic – Maggie Nelson (who’s about to release a book on two of other cultural figures I’m very interested in, Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift) is often referred to as a genius, and this month Chris Kraus was credited with reinventing the true crime novel by The New Yorker. I’m enduringly excited by these authors’ works, but there are aspects of these texts and the autotheoretical approach these authors take that sit uneasily with me. I’ve always been interested in the difference between approaching a situation compassionately and approaching it idiosyncratically and I wanted to explore that further in the context of the culture wars.

The way I approach writing has always been intuitive and this made the methodology section of my introduction a nightmare to write up, but it also offered me a lot of freedom in how I approached these sensitive subjects. I wrote my Master’s dissertation on the communication and commodification of trauma in Nelson’s works Jane (2005) and The Red Parts (2008), and my PhD sought to build on that work and compare Nelson and Didion’s approaches, but as the work started to focus on the culture wars and critique it felt important to include more and other voices. I wanted to dig into those uneasy feelings and carve out my own responses to these texts in ways reflected their reception and my understanding of their arguments in a post-#MeToo context. I was also gifted In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado by my friend Katie, and I read it in one gulp while I was pretending to be a chic New Yorker in a café called Gertie in Brooklyn. Machado was doing something similar to Didion in argument – questioning what solidarity and integrity really mean in the context of noisy cultural debates where the personal is unavoidably political – but her writing style aligned her with a hybridity of form more often associated with Nelson or Kraus, so her work seemed like the perfect optimistic text to conclude with.

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?

It’s really driven home to me that avoiding critique in favour of something that might seem like solidarity can actually be very destructive. And, that critique is so essential for moving the needle on difficult conversations, as is being able to take it as the critique on as the person it’s being directed towards. Critique is organic to creative work and critique is also a creative act, and I feel that being able approach things on a material basis and with nuance as a priority is so vital and always will be.

One of the most heartening things I’ve discovered is a multitude of sources and examples, across time periods and geographic regions, that provide evidence of trans people forming and living in community, both with other trans people and as part of wider communities. It made me realise that I had an expectation that any trans and gender non-conforming individuals would have lived very isolated lives, but this is certainly not the case!

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?

I had a very turbulent time during the PhD, and I think it taught me that although there’s very little in life that I can control, engaging with literature, film, and art and expressing my own thoughts and critical analysis really helps me cut through the chaos.

And that dogs really help with structuring my day and with focus! I started dog-sitting in the final year of the PhD and it made my work so much better.

If you were your own supervisor, what advice would you give yourself?

Probably the same advice Dr Crosthwaite gave me, which is that good analysis needs to cut through knotty writing and thorny discourses without being knotty and thorny itself. And that, as a doctoral candidate, you might think you’ve made a point very clearly because you’ve been thinking about these things for weeks and months and years, but you need to make it easy for your readers and articulate everything as if you’re inviting someone to engage with the subject for the first time.

Which researcher would you particularly like to spotlight?

I’m really interested in the work of Dr Anna Kornbluh and found her book Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism really refreshing and complex. I’d also like to spotlight the work of SGSAH scholar Leena Nammari, whose artistic work you can see at the V&A Dundee. And I’d like to sing Dr Paul Crosthwaite’s praises as an academic – his book Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis recently won the 2025 BAAS Book Prize. Working with him was a total privilege and I couldn’t have asked for a more committed and engaged supervisor.