Gill Plain

Biography

Gill Plain received her MA from Cambridge and her PhD from Newcastle for a thesis exploring women writers’ responses to the threat and actuality of the Second World War. This was published as Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (1996). She has continued to work on war writing, and is co-founder of the research network WAR-Net. She has recently completed a literary history, Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013) and is now developing a project on the literary culture of the postwar period. At St Andrews she teaches twentieth century literature, crime fiction and war writing, and has been director of the MLitt in Women Writing and Gender. She is currently Head of School.

Research Interest

Gill has research interests in crime fiction, representations of war, gender studies, British culture of the 1940s and 50s, and popular British film, and she welcomes applications from postgraduate students interested in any of these areas. Her publications include Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh, 2001), Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2002) and John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (Edinburgh, 2006). She is the editor, with Susan Sellers, of A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 2007).