Anna Johnson (she/they)
Contact
- Email: k1800865@kingston.ac.uk
- Location: Penrhyn Road
- Faculty: Kingston School of Art
- School: School of Creative and Cultural Industries
- Department: Department of Humanities
- Job market candidate
- Personal website
Research project: Motherhood: A Ghost Story
Abstract
In February 2016 I began to write about my experience of early motherhood; an experience of such unexpected, powerful, immersive strangeness that I needed to find some way of placing it at a little distance, of beginning to analyse it or maybe just trace it, through writing. This writing has grown into a full-blown life-writing practice, centred on a recurring connection between my experience of motherhood and ideas of haunting, of presence and absence and repetition (daily and generational). This practice makes up the creative-writing side of my PhD.
The critical element of this PhD looks at how, through theories of the spectral, intersectionality, queerness, feminism, failure and anecdote, amongst others, we might aspire to transform and re-possess language in an attempt to express the ineffable. There is failure inherent in this project, but I hope a valuable, generative kind of failure.
- Research degree: Practice-based PhD
- Title of project: Motherhood: A Ghost Story
- Research supervisor: Dr Meg Jensen
- Other research supervisor: Professor Sara Upstone
Biography
I live/work/parent in London and am studying for a PhD in Creative Writing here at Kingston University.
I teach on the creative writing MA, English literature MA, and English literature BA courses here at Kingston and I also run creative writing workshops.
Areas of research interest
- Life-writing
- Motherhood
- Haunting
- Intersectionality
- Chronic illness
- Queer studies
- Feminism
- Neurodiversity
- Literature
- Nature writing
Qualifications
- MA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins
- BA Hons History and Theory of Art, University of Kent
Publications
Forthcoming (2025): Motherhood: a ghost story, book, Broken Sleep Books
Forthcoming (2024): Visceral Bodies Special issue of Studies in the Maternal Journal, co-editor
2023: But also flesh and salt, creative writing, Motherlore Magazine
2023: some other register, poetry contribution to Dx: Diagnosis and Writing, dxandwriting.com
2022: But Also Flesh and Salt, creative writing, The Contemporary Journal
2022: Failure: the Ghost and the Mother, Alluvium Journal, Special Edition 10.1
2021: An Intersection of Motherhood and Chronic Illness, chapter in From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine, Demeter Press
2021: Cascading Transitions: Becoming a Writer and Engaging with Neurodiversity in Response to Motherhood, chapter in Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders, Routledge
2018: Objects of a Maternal Haunting, chapter in Everyday World-Making: Towards an Understanding of Affect and Mothering, Demeter Press
2016: Article for Mamsie (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities Identities and Ethics) blog, http://mamsie.org/2016/06/29/a-maternal-haunting/
Conference papers
2023: Visceral Bodies Symposium, interdisciplinary symposium organised by myself and fellow PhD student (Philosophy) Anna Argiró, Kingston University, April 2023
2023: Creativity and Motherhood in Lockdown: An Ongoing Conversation, creative writing zine produced with colleague Dr Lina Hakim for the CAMC Conference, Coventry, March 2023
2021: Failure: the Ghost and the Mother, talk at BACLS-WHN 2021 Virtual Conference
2019: Place in a Temporal Haunting of Motherhood, Genos/Matter/Theory Conference, Kingston University
2018: Cascading Transitions, Women in Transition Conference, Kings and Oxford Universities