Leanne Bibby

Dr Leanne Bibby joined the School of Arts and Media in September 2015. She previously taught at Leeds Beckett University and Leeds Trinity University, and as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language at Language Study Centres, Action English Language Training, and the Centre for English Studies, all in Leeds. Leanne received a PhD from Leeds Beckett in 2012 for a thesis on the cultural history of intellectual women in the fiction of British author and critic A. S. Byatt. Her research and teaching interests cover feminist and intellectual cultural histories, the relationship of literary texts to historical narrative, and literature’s critical and historiographic capacities in a range of cultural contexts.

Leanne has also worked as a Disability Support Worker at the University of Leeds, and as an Academic Communications Tutor for Leeds Beckett’s Skills for Learning department, responsible for planning and delivering innovative new training workshops for undergraduate and postgraduate students. She maintains a specialist interest in mentoring students’ development of effective study skills and professional skills, particularly as they pertain to academic and creative portfolio careers.

Leanne served as Secretary on the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association’s executive committee, 2013-2020.

Leanne specialises in historical fiction and historiographic metafiction, and the relationship of literary writing to feminist and intellectual cultural histories. She has published book chapters on history, austerity and mythopoeia in A. S. Byatt’s work, and on the impact of women’s literary writing on second-wave feminism. She has also published reviews of new feminist research for The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.

She has developing interests in anachronism and realism in contemporary historical fiction, having recently presented conference papers on the role of historical evidence in TV dramas and documentaries, and on the strategic use of anachronism in popular historical novels. As a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s New Writers’ Scheme, she works closely with authors and publishers of historical fiction as a practitioner, peer mentor, and organiser of local chapter events. In 2013 she worked as research assistant to Professor Susan Watkins in organising a series of public events funded by a Research Leadership Award at Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett), titled Conversations with Contemporary Women Writers. As part of this work, she partnered with two RNA authors, Elizabeth Chadwick and Kate Johnson, to deliver two of these Conversations sessions. Leanne was subsequently part of the team organising the public symposium Contemporary Women’s Writing and Literary Prize Culture, held at Leeds Met in June 2013.

In further public engagement work, in 2015 Leanne gave an invited talk to trainee midwives about literary perspectives on pregnancy, birth and the concept of the mind/body split, at Leeds University Midwifery Society’s annual conference. She welcomes enquiries about any aspect of her research, teaching, and writing interests.