Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department

Abstract

I often get the sense that, regarding women's place in the contemporary university, angry is the one thing I'm not allowed to be. And yet, I am often angry. This chapter explores the role of anger and its potential as a productive force able to develop the early career academic’s confidence. It focuses in particular on the position of women in my own chosen field, English Studies. Undergraduate English is dominated by women, but the further you progress in the subject, the fewer women there are. The diminishing numbers of women are indicative of experiences that statistics do not convey. In seemingly mundane, everyday ways, existing modes of exclusion are re-entrenched in the early career period in academia, and I argue that these are closely related to the conditions of the contemporary research environment.