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Biography
Before joining the Foundation Arts team in 2019, Sasha taught History at the University of Sheffield and English Literature at the University of Nottingham, and studied at University College London and Keble College Oxford. On Foundation Arts, she teaches Language and Culture, Narrative and Creativity, and the Project. In English, she teaches the early modern period, the Restoration, the Gothic, Victorian and Fin de siècle literature, and Literature & Popular Culture.
An interdisciplinary scholar with an English Literature background and social history expertise, Sasha researches gender, sex and the body as a nexus of cultural anxieties, from the early modern period to the present day. Her first book, Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation, examined female food refusal during the early modern period, its literary representations, and its precise differentiation from the modern phenomenon of eating disorders, the first interdisciplinary study of its kind. Now, her ongoing research interests include gendered embodiment and food behaviour; the history of emotions; gender, embodiment, and sexuality in Edwardian fiction; the Earl of Rochester; E.F. Benson; and hidden queer lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Currently, she is focused on queer masculinities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and writing a book about E.F. Benson and George Wolfe Plank.
Expertise Summary
Teaching: Academic communication; British history from 1500 to the present, especially women's and queer history; early modern English Literature, especially Renaissance drama, women's writing, Behn and Rochester; eighteenth and nineteenth century literature; literature and popular culture; gender, sexuality, and the body; the Gothic. Across the teaching spectrum Sasha is particularly interested in equality and diversity, access to the academy, widening participation, and links between the university and creative practice.
Research: Gender, sexuality and food in culture; the history of the body; the social history of gender, sexuality and embodiment from the early modern period to the present; early modern women's letters; Edwardian men's letters; madness and sanity; health, illness and disability; women's writing; queer writing; commonplace and receipt books; asylum culture; early modern drama; Restoration literature; queer lives and histories; gender and sexuality in Edwardian school fiction; self-starvation and food behaviour. Victorian and Edwardian masculinity, sexuality and class. Queer lives and letters.
Research Summary
Gender, sexuality and food in culture; the history of the body; self-starvation and food behaviour; the social history of gender, sexuality and embodiment from the early modern period to the present;… read more
GARWOOD, SASHA, forthcoming Spring 2026. 'Love, sex, and death: forbidden sexuality in early twentieth century public school novels.' In SARAH IVERSEN and ANNA NORDENSTAM, Eds. Encountering the Forbidden in Children's Literature: Nordic Journal of Childlit Aesthetics Special Issue. Scandinavian University Press. In press.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2025. 'Pleasure and longing.'. [Newly discovered poems shed light on E.F. Benson and sexuality.] Times Literary Supplement. 31 October.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2025. 'The great unknown romance of writer E.F. Benson's life - Fred and George, a love story hidden in letters', The Conversation.
GARWOOD, SASHA. 2024. "Manliness" and "Beastliness": Food, Sexuality, and Masculine Virtue in Three Early-Twentieth-Century Public School Novels. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 49(3), 257-278.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2019. Early Modern English Noblewomen and self-starvation: 'The skull beneath the skin'. Routledge.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2016. 'Katherine Grey', 'Jane Lumley', 'Margaret Radcliffe', in CAROLE LEVIN, ANNA RIEHL BERTOLET, and JO ELDRIDGE CARNEY, Eds. A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500-1650. Routledge. pp. 111, 267, 584.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2016. Fat sex: new directions in theory and activism. Sex Education, 16:5, 570-572, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2015.1123841
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2015. 'Katie Green' in MEG JOHN BARKER, JOSEPH DE LAPPE, CAROLINE WALTERS, Eds. Mental Health in Comics: Asylum Special Issue, 22(1 -4).
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2013. Watching Elizabeth Eating: power and the politics of penetration' in SUZANNE SCHOLZ and DANIEL DORNHOFER, Eds. Spectatorship at the Elizabethan Court. Vittorio Klostermann. pp.22-45.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2012. 'Fisting and feasting, or metamorphosis by the mouthful: food, sex, power and the female body in the erotic fiction of Pat Califia'. STET (Kings College London).
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2012. Review of A Woman Killed With Kindness (directed by Katie Mitchell for the National Theatre). Shakespeare. Vol 8, Issue 1, April 2012, pp. 92-95.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2011. Shakespeare. Review of Joan Fitzpatrick's Shakespeare and the Language of Food in Times Literary Supplement, 24th March 2011.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2011. 'Wife and widow.' Review of Giles Tremlett's Catherine of Aragon and Linda Porter's Katherine the Queen. Times Literary Supplement. Mar. 4, 2011: pp.30.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2010. 'Entering Elizabeth'. Assuming Gender, 1:1. Spring.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2010. 'Microserfs' in GEOFF HAMILTON and BRIAN JONES, eds. Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Writers and their Work (New York, Facts on File, 2010), 267-269.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2010. 'What's a play without a woman in it?': review of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney, October 2009. Shakespeare, Vol 6, Issue 2, June, pp.267-270.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2009. '"The skull beneath the skin": Women and Self-Starvation on the Renaissance Stage'. Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 145) pp.106-123.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2009. 'The Trouble With Jane'. Review of Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen. Times Literary Supplement. May 22nd, p.10.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2009. 'Owain and Catherine'. Review of Vanora Bennet, Blood Royal, in Times Literary Supplement. July 3rd, p.21.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2009. Review of Sarah Dunant, Sacred Heart. Times Literary Supplement. August 7th, p.25.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2008. 'Daughters, Defiance and Death: Jane Lumley and Euripides's 'Iphigenia,'". genre: Women, Sexuality, and Early Modern Studies. CSULB, vol 28, pp.109-125.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2008. Review of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (directed by Melly Still) at the National Theatre, London. In Shakespeare, Vol 4, Issue 4, Dec. pp.425 - 428.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2008. Review of Thomas Dekker and John Webster's Westward Ho (directed by Andrea Kantor for Paper and String) at the White Bear Theatre Club, London, April. In Shakespeare, Vol 4, Issue 3, Sept. 2008, pp.332-335.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS:
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2024. 'The Skull beneath the Skin: women, sex, and food refusal in early modern England'. Stori Naturali di Digiuni Prodigiosi, University of Pavia, September 17th 2024. Invited speaker.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2024. 'From athletocracy to wild swimming: love, sexuality, and Edwardian masculinity'. Wild Play, University of Nottingham Department of Philosophy, April 26th 2024.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2024. ''Michael Sheen Ghosted Me', or Interdisiplinarity, inclusivity, and inviting challenges on a Foundation course.' University of Nottingham Teaching & Learning conference, 23rd April 2024.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2021. ''Manliness' and 'beastliness': masculinity, sexuality and food in early twentieth century public school fiction'. 'You Are What You Eat': Food and Identity From the Middle Ages to the Modern Day at University of Warwick, Friday 18th June 2021.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2020. 'Manliness and Beastliness: sex, food and masculinity in Edwardian public school fiction'. Devouring Men: Food Masculinity and Power, University of St Andrews, 4 September 2020.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2019. 'I'll starve myself to death!' - Self-starvation, self-assertion, and women's violence against the self in early modern England.' Gender and Violence in the Early Modern World, Women's History Network at the University of Cambridge, 23 November 2019.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2018. '"This miserable and wretched body of mine": women's emotions, food refusal and the gendered body in early modern England'. Gendered Emotions in History conference, University of Sheffield, 29 June 2018.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2016. 'Sifting through the ashes: exploring the social circle of the country house at Brodsworth Hall'. White Rose Humanities Research Network Travel and Transport conference, University of York, 10 September 2016.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2016. ''At dinner, supper or in taverns': food and community in early modern England'. Concepts of Community conference, University of Sheffield, 21-22 March 2016.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2012. 'Elizabeth Eating (or not): food and the body as means of communication'. Royal Bodies, Royal Holloway, 2-4 April 2012.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2010. 'Fisting and Feasting: femininity, desire, and the iconography of the female body in hardcore BDSM pornography.' (Image)ining the Female Body conference, University of Sussex, October 29th 2010.
GARWOOD, SASHA, 2010. 'Women and self-starvation: materialising the spiritual'. Materialising the Spiritual, Society for Renaissance Studies conference, York, 16-18 July 2010.