A warm welcome to the University of Otago City of Literature PhD Scholarship Recipient 2025!

By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City Of Literature | Posted: Monday Apr 28, 2025

Congratulations and welcome to Pascale Grard.

Each year, this scholarship is awarded by the University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka to one exceptional candidate whose doctoral research focuses on the study of literature. The scholarship supports bold, original work that deepens our understanding of the literary arts.

 

Pascale brings to Ōtepoti a vibrant research background shaped in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. Her academic interests span women’s studies, modernisms, the medical humanities, and the gothic. Pascale is based in the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies | Mātai Airana, Mātai Kotirana. Her PhD is supervised by Prof Maebh Long, Prof Liam McIlvanney, and Dr Charlotte Greenhalgh.

 

Pascale’s PhD, ‘A Modernist Poetics of Pregnancy’,

examines representations of pregnancy and childbirth written by modernist women. Regularly mentioned but seldom seen, pregnancy in the nineteenth century novel occupies little space. If it is present, it exists to introduce a new character, to ruin a character, or to have a character die during childbirth. If a pregnant woman features outside of these depictions, her experience of her pregnancy rarely does. In her 1923 novel, Escapade, modernist author Evelyn Scott wonders why ‘the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the artist’. Indeed, despite its universal presence, pregnancy as an embodied experience lacks literary representation. In a social and political climate of increasing scrutiny and idealisation of pregnancy and pregnant bodies, female authors of the early twentieth century moved pregnancy out of literary confinement and into the centre of the frame, where pregnancy is given detailed artistic engagement. Adopting an interdisciplinary and transnational approach that combines literary criticism, history, and the medical humanities, the project unpacks these modernist representations to produce a modernist composite of pregnancy that revises the status of pregnancy in modernism and foregrounds the neglected contributions of female authors to early twentieth century constructions of pregnancy.

Outside of research, Pascale finds joy in the arts, tennis and exploring.

 

Warm congratulations to Pascale on this recognition and welcome to Ōtepoti!

 

More details on the scholarship here: University of Otago City of Literature PhD Scholarship, Scholarships Database | University of Otago