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Staff Profile

Dr Rachel Hewitt

Lecturer in Creative Writing

Background

Role in the School


I am Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts. 


Biography


BA (Hons) English Literature (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)

M.St in English Literature (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)

PhD in English Literature (University of London)

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature


Expertise


I am a prize-winning writer of creative non-fiction. My creative projects are unified by the aim of understanding and representing processes of cultural change, and the effects of change on individuals’ lives; with particular recent focus on changes regarding women’s rights and freedoms. My forthcoming third book is In Her Nature: On Women, Outdoors, and it has already won the prestigious British Library Eccles Writer’s Award, and is currently ‘in press’ and will be published by Chatto & Windus (a Penguin imprint) in 2022. Using biography and memoir, In Her Nature explores historical and personal moments when women’s freedom in public space becomes curtailed, and I show how these constraints significantly curtail women’s presence in the public sphere, as well as the effects on individual women’s lives.


My first book, the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2010) explored how changing ideas about British nationhood shaped the ways in which individuals moved around and imagined British landscape, and it won the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and was short- and long-listed for multiple other awards. My second book was A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (London: Granta, 2017), which won a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing residency, and was widely reviewed and acclaimed. A Revolution of Feeling revealed how mainstream attitudes to emotion and gender changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I used group biography and memoir to narrate how five individuals reacted to pronounced alterations in the cultural temperament, from optimism to disappointed resignation. In a review, the author Frances Wilson predicted that my book ‘will change the way we think about feeling.’


My creative mode ranges across different styles and genres in order to understand and narrative such complex historical changes, and their effects on human lives. I gain a great deal from collaboration with the aim of better understanding such cultural and social changes and their impacts on women’s freedoms, and I am PI of the AHRC-UKRI network Women in the Hills. My passion for collaboration also shapes my work as Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. 


I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and a New Generation Thinker, as part of the AHRC and BBC Radio 3 scheme. I have recently written and presented programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4 on the history of sexual violence against women in public places. I am represented by Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. 

Research

My creative projects are unified by the aim of understanding and representing processes of cultural change, and the effects of change on individuals’ lives; with particular focus on the lives of women who lived through pronounced changes regarding women’s rights and freedoms. I am a life-writer who uses group and single-life biography combined with memoir, in a way that opens out onto other modes of analysis, such as history of ideas, social/economic/cultural history, sociology, philosophy and psychology, creating a hybrid creative style.


In Her Nature: On Women, Outdoors (Chatto & Windus; 2022)


My forthcoming third book, In Her Nature, is a part-memoir, part-biography, which explores contemporary and historical experiences of women in public space, and the factors that constrain women’s freedom outdoors. With an initial focus on outdoor sport and leisure (especially trail-running, hiking and mountaineering), In Her Nature identifies and analyses the factors that make women’s experiences outdoors distinct from men’s, including caring responsibilities, clothing and kit provision, and street harassment and sexual violence. My book explores how men’s constraints on women’s freedom and safety in public space tighten and loosen under particular historical conditions, and I narrate the biography of one woman – mountaineer Elizabeth Le Blond (1860-1934) – who lived through a period in which women’s freedoms became significantly curtailed, before turning the lens onto the constrictions negotiated by contemporary women, including myself.


In Her Nature has won the prestigious British Library Eccles’ Award (a work-in-progress prize, now called the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award) and will be published in 2022.  


I have recently written and presented programmes for Radio 3 and 4 on this work: The Long View on Violence Against Women in Public, Repeating Patterns in the Street Harassment of Women, and you can listen to a podcast of me discussing my work (while it was in its earlier stages) with historian Helen Carr. I have written for The Guardian on public violence against women and – following my viral Twitter thread on the subject – I wrote for the New Statesman on the gendered dynamics that shape how pedestrians move around public space. I also wrote a widely-shared long-read piece of memoir-based creative non-fiction on the radical potential of running for women, in the Economist’s 1843 magazine. There will be much more to come!


Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta, 2010/11)


My first book, the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, was published by Granta in 2010. It charted the history of Britain's national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, and the lives of the individuals who created the first maps. Map of a Nation explored how conceptions of British nationhood radically changed around the turn of the nineteenth century, and it plotted how such changes reverberated through the ways in which Britons imagined and moved around the country’s landscape.


Map of a Nation won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Galaxy Non-Fiction Awards, the Scottish Book Awards, the Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize and BBC History Magazine's Book Prize. 


I published articles deriving from my research in academic journals and essay collections, including Romantic Cartographies (2020) and Imago Mundi. I also wrote widely about the history of the Ordnance Survey for newspapers including the Telegraph, Guardian, and the Financial Times, and on an episode of the BBC’s Timeshift programme dedicated to ‘the Ordnance Survey Story.’ I spoke about Map of a Nation at guest lectures and book festivals around the world.


A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (Granta: 2017/18).


My second book was A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, published by Granta in 2017. A Revolution of Feeling is about emotion: it explores how the emotions that we allow ourselves to feel are shaped by our societies, cultures, politics, and languages. In particular, my book is interested in emotional change – radical shifts in how people think and talk about emotion – and I was interested in how this is bound up with dramatic political change. A Revolution of Feeling explores these ideas in the context of one historical decade: I trace how the 1790s saw the collapse of radical political projects and, with them, the ushering-in of a new way of thinking about emotion. My book tells the stories of five political radicals who began the decade as embodiments of the late enlightenment’s spirit of buoyant optimism, but ended it crushed by disappointment and disillusionment; harbingers of a new cultural attitude towards emotion, defined by pessimism, conservativism and individualism.


I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in order to write A Revolution of Feeling, and it won a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing Residency.


I spoke about research published in A Revolution of Feeling on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week,  BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, on BBC Radio 3 during a Proms Extra talk on sentimentality, and I wrote about my work in The Guardian and New Statesman, and in academic journals, including Lancet Psychiatry. I spoke widely about A Revolution of Feeling at guest lectures and book festivals.


Collaborations and Projects


My own creative style is essentially collaborative, and draws upon models and source material from a vast range of scholars, archives, disciplines and genres. I hugely value collaboration in terms of both research and dissemination. I am Principal Investigator on the AHRC-UKRI network Women In The Hills, which explores historical and contemporary evidence about the factors that constrain women’s participation in outdoor leisure, and we are working towards formulating a report identifying these factors and recommending interventions. The network involves academic scholars, as well as industry project partners including the John Muir Trust, National Trust, Girls on Hills and Pelvic Roar. I am also a Co-Investigator on the ESRC-UKRI Violence, Abuse and Mental Health Network, which aims to reduce the prevalence of mental health problems among children, adults and the elderly, by bringing together experts with different waks of thinking about violence, abuse and mental health.


I am Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, where my emphasis is also on collaboration, and the benefits of bringing a diverse range of creative voices into conversation. I organised a major nature-writing festival – The Lost Voices – designed to amplify the voices of demographic groups that have traditionally been marginalised in the nature- and landscape-writing genres. NCLA collaborates with project partners including local county councils, prisons, schools, and arts organisations.

Teaching

Learning and Teaching


My Consultation Hours are Wednesdays, 1.30pm to 3.30pm, or by appointment.


I am passionate about delivering high-quality, innovative teaching, which draws upon my own expertise in creative-writing and research, and seeks to introduce students to a diverse range of writers, texts, and creative practices. I lead a postgraduate module on life-writing and an undergraduate module in which students produce an extended piece of creative (fictional or non-fictional) prose. I also teach on other creative writing modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.


Research Supervision


My areas of expertise for research supervision are life-writing and creative non-fiction, often with an emphasis on women’s lives; embodiment; creative hybridity; nature-, landscape- and place-writing; and reimaginings of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment history. With an intellectual background in both creative writing and literary criticism, I am well-placed to offer support in both the creative and critical elements of PhD theses.


Current research students include:


John Lish, who is working on a novel tackling the seductions and pitfalls of biographical practice, especially around Lord Byron.


Emily Chapman, who is working on a collection of memoir-based essays and ghost stories about adolescent girlhood, and alienation from the female body.


Alison Reid, who is working on a series of creative non-fictional essays about trans-Atlantic crossings, and forging a mode of writing to represent the ocean.   


Previous research students include:


Tamzin Mackie, who completed on an M.Litt thesis on ‘Imagined Cartographies and the Dynamics of Place in Julia Darling’s Private and Published Work.’

Publications