Influential women: English academics share expertise in the media
Spring has been a busy time for Southampton staff in the media, with our academics called upon for expertise in areas from adolescence to elegance to illness.
In ‘What is it About Judy Blume’ ( Radio 4, Easter Sunday ), Devorah Baum brought her psychoanalytic and deconstructive work on post-war American Literature to bear on the popular children’s and teen author, Judy Blume. Exploring questions of sexuality, peer-group formation, agency and difference, Devorah highlighted the impact that Blume has had on a generation of professional and intellectual women, now coming of age, who read her in the 1980s.
Emma Clery was interviewed by Rachel Johnson for ‘How to Be a Lady - an Elegant History’ ( BBC4, 26th March ). Emma suggested that there is a strongly egalitarian edge to the notion of 'ladyhood' we find in the works of Jane Austen and other early novelists. Their emphasis on the importance of fortitude in a lady was a tacit acknowledgement of the hardships and inequalities facing women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Meanwhile, in 'Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History' ( BBC 2, 8 April ), Alice Hunt spoke to Lucy Worsley about the relationship between the personal life of Mary I and her religious beliefs, and her fitness to rule as England’s first queen.
