An internationally renowned author and distinguished critic of early women writers has joined the University of Aberdeen’s School of Language and Literature.
Professor Janet Todd joins Aberdeen from her previous post as Francis Hutcheson Professor in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her appointment as The Herbert J C Grierson Chair in English Literature at Aberdeen is part of the University’s Chairs for the Sixth Century recruitment campaign, in which 26 new Chair appointments have been made.
Professor Todd’s key projects at Aberdeen will be to work closely with her colleagues in the English department to develop the postgraduate MLitt courses further and help in the recruitment of graduate students. She is planning a new MLitt in the Novel to start in 2006 which will include her own course on Jane Austen; it will form part of another new initiative, the Centre for the Novel, which, working with the library’s special collections in fiction and exploiting the department’s unrivalled reputation in editing, will host seminars and conferences on topics such as the ‘Novel and National Heritage’. The Centre hopes to link with other similar centres in Europe.
Professor Todd, M.A, Ph.D, is the author of more than 15 works of non-fiction, including most recently biographies of Aphra Behn (1996), Mary Wollstonecraft (2000) and her Irish pupils Margaret and Mary King in Rebel Daughters (2003). She is now at work on two books: one concerning William Godwin’s daughters, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Fanny Imlay and another the novels of Jane Austen .
Professor Todd said she was enjoying her first challenges at the University of Aberdeen. She said: “I am excited to have this new opportunity to develop my interests in early women writers and in Irish-Scottish literature. I was delighted to join a department with such strong achievements in these areas and in the practice and theory of editing.”
Professor Todd’s pioneering Dictionary of British and American Women Writers opened up a new area of research for scholars and she followed it with numerous editions of early women’s writing, including individual works of Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, and Helen Maria Williams, and complete editions of Aphra Behn and (with Marilyn Butler) Mary Wollstonecraft.
She is the general editor of the nine-volume edition of Jane Austen’s novels due out in 2005-6 from Cambridge University Press with an international array of scholars as editors and contributors. She herself is editing Jane Austen in Context, volume 9 of the series, and Persuasion with Antje Blank.
In addition to her editing of early texts Professor Todd has produced many collections of essays including a series on images of women in literature and film and more recently Gender Art and Death and Aphra Behn Studies, and (with Derek Hughes) the Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (2004). In the 1970s in the US she started the first journal devoted to women’s literature and she is co-editor of Women’s Writing, now in its eleventh year.
Professor Todd has worked in Universities in the United States (Rutgers and Puerto Rico), Africa (Cape Coast) and the UK (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and UEA), and is a frequent speaker in the States and Europe. She has discussed her work at literary festivals in Hay, Cheltenham and Dartington and she has contributed to radio programmes such as Woman’s Hour, Start the Week and In Our Time.