Tilly Nevin

Matilda Nevin is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London working at the intersection of comparative literature and disability studies, with a particular focus on how experiences of multilingualism are represented in literature. 

 

In her current project, Writing and Reading Differently: Deafness in Contemporary Women’s Literature, Nevin analyses texts by d/Deaf women from Francophone, Anglophone and Italophone contexts. Exploring the translation of signed languages to the written form, the impact of Sign Language Storytelling on the written form, and the tensions that arise in categorisations of ‘Deaf literature’, she argues that these writers reimagine the literary form, making space in turn for alternative and non-normative readings. 

 

After finishing her BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge, Nevin completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews. In her thesis, ‘Mourning, Multilingualism and (M)Other Tongues: Women Writing Transnational Autofiction of Exile’, she discussed the sense of linguistic loss in transnational and autofictional women’s writing. 

 

She has published multiple articles on women’s literature, such as ‘Punctuated Lives: Abortion, Ellipses, and Parentheses in Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Line Papin’s Une vie possible (2022)’ for L'Esprit créateur. She also has a chapter forthcoming In Redefining Womanhood: Agency, Voice, and Identity in Francophone Women’s Cultural Production (Peter Lang) on the voice of the subaltern in Meryem Alaoui’s La vérité sort de la Bouche du cheval (2018). 

 

During her PhD, Nevin was a Visiting Researcher at the Glasgow Seed Library (funded by Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities), where she ran reading groups and events on texts written about migration and the environment. She also write book reviews regularly for Asymptote Journal and for her own social media platforms.