Eleanor Spencer-Regan

Vice-Principal and Senior Tutor of St Chad's College, Durham University

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is the Vice-Principal and Senior Tutor at St Chad's College at the University of Durham, where she also teaches in the Department of English Studies.

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, under the supervision of Dr Gareth Reeves and Dr Jason Harding. She is the recipient of an AHRC Research Preparation Masters Award (2007-2008) and an AHRC Doctoral Award (2008-2011).

Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century British and American poetry, allusion and echo in contemporary poetry, literary synaesthesia, children’s fiction, and popular fiction. She is a trained 'Get Into Reading' shared reading group facilitator, fully accredited by The Reader Organisation, and was 'Reader in Residence' at a women’s prison from 2010-2011. Eleanor is a guest lecturer for Sovereign Education, lecturing to AS and A2 Level students on various areas of the English Literature syllabus, and she regularly participates in school outreach events for the University’s Access and Student Recruitment department.

In 2011, she was awarded a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship, enabling her to take up a Visiting Fellowship in the Department of English at Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with Professor Helen Vendler and Professor Stephen Burt. Her recent publications include a chapter on the work of Kathleen Jamie (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the New Casebook on American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Forthcoming publications include chapters on love poetry and on the work of Anne Stevenson in the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry 1960-2010 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), and a chapter in Sylvia Plath in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018).