Rebecca Althaus
About the researcher
Rebecca is embedded in the Cornish poetry community; her poetry has been highly commended in The Poetry Business 2021 International Book & Pamphlet Competition and published in The North, Tears in the Fence and Raceme. Her poetry films were selected for The Hypatia Trust’s 2023 and 2024 Women in Word Festivals, and she performed at Dark Kernow’s inaugural 2024 Voices on the Edge event. She is currently editing a verse memoir about the death of her partner and working on a practice-based research project in the fields of creative writing and death studies.
Research interests
- Poetry
- Death & Grief Studies
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Love in the Deadly Silence: making meaning out of grieving through creative writing
Abstract
Drawing on my lived experience of bereavement this practice-based research project seeks to question contemporary secular UK mores about death and grieving through and alongside a creative account of my personal story; it will foreground the autobiographic and autoethnographic as methodological approaches to illuminate this relationship between individual mourning and the wider cultural landscape of death and grief. I will be exploring the effects of bereavement on identity, the concept of home, and the idea of meaning in life by spending time outside on the moor around my house; this embodied practice in place where place interacts with grief will provide the impetus for a hybrid body of creative work comprising of poetry and prose memoir. The project sits in the context of personal accounts of grieving by writers such as Joan Didion and Sharon Olds, nature-place writers such as Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder, and other non-academic and academic voices speaking about place, death and grief.
Qualifications
| Year | Qualification | Awarding body |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | MA Creative Writing (distinction) | Bath Spa University |
| 1989 | BA Philosophy & Literature 2:1 | The University of Warwick |