Dr Eleanor Spencer-Regan (she/her)

Eleanor Spencer-Regan joined the JCH community in 2022, having been Vice-Principal and Senior Tutor of St Chad’s College and Vice-Principal (Student Enrichment Directorate) at Durham University in the UK. She was awarded a First Class Honours BA in English Literature in 2007 and an MA with Distinction in Studies in Poetry in 2008, both at the University of Durham. She completed her doctoral thesis on tradition, inheritance, and influence in the work of the Anglo-American poet Anne Stevenson in 2012. She was awarded an AHRC Research Preparation Masters Award (2007-2008) and an AHRC Doctoral Award (2008-2011). In 2011-2012, she was the recipient of a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century British and American poetry, allusion and echo in contemporary poetry, literary synaesthesia, children’s and Young Adult fiction, and popular fiction.

She is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her recent publications include the New Casebook on American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), essays in the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry 1960-2015 (Wiley Blackwell, 2020), and an essay in Sylvia Plath in Context (Cambridge University Press). Forthcoming publications include a co-edited volume, Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2023).

Eleanor lives with her husband, Stephen and their young son, Wolfe, in Parkville. She is a keen long-distance runner and open water swimmer, and is currently training towards becoming a member of the 7 Continents Marathon Club, reserved for athletes who have run a marathon within the Antarctic Circle as well as on the other six continents.