Ellie Mitchell

Ellie (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of English. Supervised by Professors Emma Sutton and Zinnie Harris, her doctoral research aims to uncover an overlooked history of Virginia Woolf's interest and involvement in the dramatic arts. Her thesis is provisionally titled '"Can Prose Be Dramatic?": Performance, Spectatorship, and Woolf's Dramatic Prose', and aims to establish how far the dramatic arts were formative influences on Woolf's fiction. Ellie's PhD research is funded by the AHRC via a SGSAH scholarship.

Before coming to St Andrews, Ellie studied for the BA in English and MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Cambridge. She has written widely on Virginia Woolf, with focuses ranging from late-Victorian physics and early-twentieth-century archaeology to materialist philosophy and modern anthropology. Throughout her time at Cambridge, Ellie was actively involved in the student drama scene and after graduating was employed as Production Manager of the ADC Theatre for two years. She currently lectures for Literature Cambridge, an independent educational organisation which offers accessible study sessions and summer courses to a public audience.

In addition to her specialist interest in Woolf, Ellie has broader research interests in the fields of literary and theatrical modernism including: the bloomsbury group; heritage studies; twentieth-century popular culture; women's writing; material culture studies; scenic and lighting design; post-impressionism; tragedy; grief memoirs; and twentieth-century architecture and interior design. Her less academic interests include long walks, French cooking, bad puns, period dramas, wild swimming, and elderflower flavoured things.