Leanne Bibby

Dr Leanne Bibby joined Teesside University 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. She has also worked in Disability Support at the University of 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 and the relationship of literary writing to historical narrative.

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 research on history, austerity and mythopoeia in A. S. Byatt’s fiction, the impact of women’s literary writing on second-wave feminism, and the capacity of literary writing to archive historical evidence. She has forthcoming publications on realism and anachronism in historical novels and on women novelists’ representations of classical masculinity.

Leanne is developing new work on representations of the twentieth century in contemporary historical fiction and on the intersections between critical and creative practice: specifically, the role that writing can play in promoting understanding of religious belief. 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 and organiser of local chapter events. She welcomes enquiries about any aspect of her work.