Mimi Lu

Thesis Title: Modern Literature and the Idea of a University

Supervisor: Helen Small

Research Interests: Modernist Literature, Victorian Literature, British Romanticism, Intellectual History, Higher Education

Doctoral Research: My research focuses on how modern writers between 1900 and 1970 were responding to broader conversations about the idea of a “University” as a historical reality, a textual construct, a collective fantasy, and a fulcrum for broader cultural anxieties. I explore how fictional representations of the higher education landscape, both in Britain and abroad, contributed to shaping contemporary attitudes and discourses about the meaning of a “liberal education,” improving access to the elite institutions, the respective merits of disparate pedagogical models, the conflicting imperatives of teaching and research, the question of vocation, and human perfectibility.