Shona Whelan

I was an undergraduate at Homerton College, Cambridge, graduating with a double Starred First and several academic awards, including the Mrs Claude Beddington Prize for showing the greatest distinction in Part II of the degree. I remained at Homerton for my MPhil (Distinction), which was fully funded by a Baillie Gifford Cambridge Masters Studentship. My PhD, supervised by Dr Rebecca Anne Barr, is generously funded by an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP – Newnham College Studentship.

My research brings the prose works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays and Mary Robinson into dialogue with contemporary feminist care ethics. Drawing on the philosophy of Nel Noddings in particular, it argues that the central principles of care ethics – emphasising the importance of relationality, an attentive regard for the other and the moral and evaluative capacities of the emotions – can enrich our understanding of the ethical potential of these authors’ novels. By placing these writers’ novels alongside their pedagogical and polemical writings, this work aims to reconsider the significance of affective engagement in the Revolutionary period’s debates on women’s educational, social and political rights.

Outside of the Romantic period, I am also interested in nineteenth century women’s writing, modernist women’s writing and feminist approaches to affect theory, histories and philosophies of the emotions and many branches of feminist and relational philosophy.