Best doctoral thesis prize for English DPhil

26 August 2020

Congratulations to Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston who has been awarded the Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize for their thesis on Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health.

The Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize was established in 2018 in memory of the scholar of literatures in English and other languages, Swapna Dev, by her husband. It is awarded for the best doctoral thesis in English literature at the University of Oxford.

Lloyd (Meadhbh)’s thesis explores the politicised role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish modernism. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, the New Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community.

This article was originally published by the Faculty of English Language & Literature.