Marlene Briggs

Marlene Briggs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Arts. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to war and conflict in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, specializing in the cultural transmission and reception of the First World War in modern and contemporary British literature.

Her research interests encompass conflict, gender, memory, mourning, reconstruction, testimony, trauma, and war writing. She specializes in the study of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in the aftermath of international hostilities, as well as the intergenerational legacies of the First World War in British culture and society. Her scholarly work demonstrates comparative, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and transgenerational approaches to understanding historical trauma and cultural memory.

Briggs' publications reveal a consistent focus on trauma studies and memory studies within British literary contexts, particularly examining how the First World War continues to shape cultural narratives across generations. Her research spans from historical trauma in modernist literature to contemporary representations of war memory, with particular attention to veterans' testimonies and literary responses to historical events.

Her teaching portfolio includes courses on First World War poetry and prose from Britain, America, Canada, and Ireland; the contested legacies of the First World War and the Easter Rising; landmark Anglo-American novels published between the World Wars; theories of trauma relating to multiple historical traumas; and contemporary Canadian rewritings of the First World War.