Betty Jay

Betty Jay is a Senior Lecturer (Teaching-Focussed) in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, specializing in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Theory. She has held academic positions since 1995, previously lecturing at the University of Leicester and Cardiff University. Her research focuses on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, modernism, post-colonialism, and war literature. She currently serves as Senior Tutor.

Education includes a BA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Southampton (1989), a Marion Johnson Fellowship at Rutgers University (USA), and a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London (1995), completing a thesis on William Golding.

• Expertise: Virginia Woolf, masculinity studies, First World War literature, contemporary women's writing

Her research output includes 9 publications across books, peer-reviewed articles, and reviews, with a focus on 20th-century American literature, trauma narratives, and gender dynamics. Notable works analyze texts such as My Ántonia, Go Set a Watchman, and The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky. She has supervised PhD projects on Janet Frame, Carson McCullers, and Wilfred Owen.

Labs/Teams: Active contributor to the university's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in promoting gender equality (SDG5) through literary analysis.