Dr. RIDGE Emily

I completed my B.A. at Trinity College Dublin and M.A. at University College London. In 2012, I was awarded my PhD at Durham University. Following several years at the Education University of Hong Kong, I joined the Department of English here at City University of Hong Kong as an Associate Professor of English Literature in 2019. My first monograph was published in July 2017 by Edinburgh University Press, Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light. It considers the impact of a new culture of portability upon modernist visions of and approaches to fiction, spanning from the late nineteenth century to World War II. A central aim is to account for and explore modernist conceptions of literary form in mobile rather than static terms, as set against Victorian ‘house of fiction’ models. 

More recently, I have become interested in fraught literary representations of hospitality and empathy in late modernist and postwar writing, particularly the ways in which such troubled depictions invoke and reflect upon acts of political diplomacy, immigration, welfare and the reception of refugees across the continent of Europe around the Second World War. My next book-length project will focus on narrative empathy and biopolitics in British women’s writing of the mid-century period. 

Articles based on aspects of my research have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2019), Papers on Language and Literature (2019), Literature Compass (2016), Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (2015), Modernism/Modernity (2014), Textual Practice (2013), and Katherine Mansfield Studies (2013). I am co-editor (with Dr. Jeffrey Clapp) of a volume of essays entitled Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge 2016).

I am also a founding member of the Modernist Studies in Asia (MSIA) Network. For further details on our work and activities, please take a look at our website: https://modernismasia.wixsite.com/main

For further information on my monograph, see:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-portable-modernisms.html

and

https://euppublishingblog.com/2017/07/20/living-modernlys-living-quickly-note-travelling-light/

For further information on the collection I co-edited, see:
https://www.routledge.com/Security-and-Hospitality-in-Literature-and-Culture-Modern-and-Contemporary/Clapp-Ridge/p/book/9781138915848

You can also follow me on twitter @DrEmilyRidge