Anna Ball

Anna is a third-year PhD candidate in the School of English, supervised by Karen Solie. As a poet and a scholar of literature and linguistics, her thesis includes creative and critical aspects. She works on the intersection of metonymic figuration and feminist approaches to the sublime, particularly in poetry of inconsolable experience from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Her critical thesis considers the work of American poet Deborah Digges, among others, and is currently titled ‘The Accidental Star Inside the Apple: Detail and Crisis in Contemporary Women’s Poetry’. Anna is also writing her own collection of poems. She understands her creative practice to inform her critical investigation, intending for both to contribute to new understandings of the practice of writing poetry; thus her research can be seen as practice-led. Her doctoral research is funded by the School of English Handsel Scholarship.

The research interests most relevant to Anna’s current projects are conceptual metaphor theory, perspectives on the sublime in literature, trauma studies, and creative practice as research. Her broader research interests include cognitive poetics, psychoanalytic approaches to literature, theories of art therapy, disability studies, and literary translation.

She is deeply curious about the paradoxical capacity of literature, especially poetry, to communicate through failures of language, influenced by her experience with a disability that affects her language comprehension. As a result of her neurodivergence, she is also preoccupied with formulas for poetic craft, especially the evolution of traditional subgenres of poetry, modes of contemplation within received forms, and the interplay of narrative and lyric.

Anna’s interdisciplinary background in cognitive linguistics, foreign languages, literature, and creative writing underpin her ongoing inquiry into the mysterious capacities of language as a medium of art. She is also interested in theories of pedagogy and committed to scholarship of best practices in teaching the language arts.

Before moving to Scotland to start her doctorate, Anna earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. There she served as the Walter and Nancy Kidd Graduate Teaching Fellow in poetry from 2017-2018, designing and leading a year-long series of studio courses for a small cohort of undergraduate poets.

She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics, magna cum laude, from the University of Maryland, where she worked as a research assistant on first language acquisition for the Project on Children’s Language Learning. She was also awarded the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies for her undergraduate work in creative writing.

Photo Credit: Erik(a) Jonah

Literature

Fall 2025 | EN2902 Writing Scotland: Creative and Critical Approaches | Tutor (Graduate Teaching Assistant)

Fall 2024 | EN1003 Culture and Conflict: An Introduction to Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature | Tutor (Graduate Teaching Assistant)

Creative Writing

Fall 2025 | Creative Writing Programme for Academic Skills Project | School Coordinator, Writing Lab Mentor

Spring 2025 | Creative Writing Programme for Academic Skills Project | School Coordinator, Writing Lab Mentor, Workshop Leader

Fall 2024 | Creative Writing Programme for Academic Skills Project | School Coordinator, Writing Lab Mentor, Workshop Leader

Spring 2024 | Poetic Temperaments: Story, Music, Structure, Imagination \ Tutor (Instructor of Record)

External positions

Creative Writing

Scottish Universities' International Summer School, University of Edinburgh

Summer 2025 | Craft Temperaments in Creative Writing | Tutor (Instructor of Record)