Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

OpenARC PhD Research Brief - Hannah Glancy


Hannah Glancy
1 year PhD student,
English & Creative Writing

About the researcher

I am a PhD researcher in English Literature at The Open University, funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. My background is in English, creative writing, and teaching. I’m particularly interested in feminist literature, science fiction, and the politics of publishing. Alongside my research, I teach English and work on projects that connect academic research with wider public audiences. I’m passionate about making literary research accessible and showing how stories shape the worlds we imagine.

Title

The Women’s Press Science Fiction series, a little-known feminist publishing project from the 1980s

Five key insights about your research

  1. Science fiction has feminist origins: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein helped found the genre.
  2. Early science fiction explored global crisis — Shelley’s The Last Man imagines a world devastated by plague.
  3. Science fiction culture is shaped by readers as well as publishers, for example through the fan-voted Hugo Awards.
  4. Science fiction shapes language and ideas about science and society. Isaac Asimov coined terms such as “robotics” and “psychohistory,” demonstrating how speculative fiction influences how we talk about science and society.
  5. In just five years, The Women’s Press published 35 genre-specific speculative novels and an anthology of short sci-fi stories solely by women — a remarkable feminist intervention in publishing.

What is your research about?

My research explores a little-known feminist publishing project from the 1980s: The Women’s Press Science Fiction series. Between 1985 and 1990, this UK-based feminist publisher published over 40 science fiction novels by women. Some were by well-known writers, others by authors who have since disapeared from view. I study how these books imagined alternative futures that challenged ideas about gender, power, technology, and society - and what it means that many of them are now forgotten or out of print. Ultimately, my research asks who gets to fictionalise science and who gets remembered doing it.

How are you conducting your research?

I’m in the early stages, so I’m reading widely and beginning archival work. At the LSE Library, I’ll explore publishing records, letters, and notes from The Women’s Press to understand how these books were produced and promoted. I’m also looking at the social and political climate of 1980s Britain to understand why feminist science fiction flourished — and why it later faded.

How does your research benefit widersociety?

My research is relevant to anyone interested in books, feminism, publishing, or how we imagine the future. Women have long written bold science fiction but are often less discussed than male counterparts. My research helps recover these lost stories and encourages readers to think about who gets represented in literature, whose voices are preserved, and how cultural memory is shaped. It may also inspire readers to rediscover forgotten books and reflect on how stories influence our ideas about society and change.