Mimi Lu

Thesis Title: The Twentieth-Century English University and its Exclusions: Literature and the Politics of Expanding Higher Education 

Supervisor: Professor Helen Small

Research Interests: Modernist Literature, Victorian Literature, Intellectual History, Critical University Studies, Law and Literature  

Doctoral Research: My thesis examines the ways in which the university was portrayed as an experience and an idea in English literature during the twentieth century, a period that saw extensive debates about the purpose, value, and accessibility of higher education. I trace how literary writers problematised the dominant cultural narratives about the extension of access to higher education, responded to the ideological tensions between democratic and emerging meritocratic principles as they played out in educational reforms, and criticised institutional entrenchments of various forms of intersectional disadvantage.