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Dr Stephanie Munro

FHEA

Profile summary

  • Honorary Associate
  • Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
  • School of Arts & Humanities
  • English & Creative Writing
  • stephanie.munro

Professional biography

I began my Higher Education career in the social sciences, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Sociology (Lancaster University, 1991) and then an MA in Psychiatry, Philosophy & Society (University of Sheffield, 1994). After a foundation course in Art Therapy (University of Sheffield, 1999), I moved into postgraduate research in English Literature. My MPhil. English Literature thesis (University of Sheffield, 2002) is on African American women’s writing, a topic that led, by way of research into Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and its contexts, to my PhD Women's Studies thesis on the writings of the American abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child (Lancaster University, 2006), including An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836), Philothea (1836), Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (1838), Letters from New York (1843 and 1845), The Freedman’s Book (1865), A Romance of the Republic (1867) and various short stories for children and adults published in periodicals between the 1820s and the 1860s. 

I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2010, after completing my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (English Literature subject specialism) with the Open University in 2009. 

Research interests

I am interested in hidden histories and literary representations, and in how voyaging has been used as a metaphor in literature and culture since the sixteenth century. Early modern drama, renaissance cartography, eighteenth-century satire, folk and fairy tales, Romantic poetry, autobiography and memoir, nineteenth-century novels, science fiction and contemporary fiction, film and animation for children and for adults, and digital media, all provide food for thought. I am currently researching the history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817), its contexts, versions, illustrations, and relevance for the twenty-first century. 

Teaching interests

I am an Associate Lecturer and currently teach: 

A111: Discovering the Arts and Humanities.

A112: Cultures.

YXM130: Making Your Learning Count.

A233: Telling Stories: the novel and beyond.

My primary subject specialism is English Literature, though I have taught widely in the Arts and Humanities since I started teaching for the Open University in 2007. I conducted research into online learning from a student perspective as part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, and have continuing interests in how best to harness the benefits for students and for tutors of digital resources.