Dr Naomi Hetherington

BA, MA, PhD FHEA

Department for Lifelong Learning

University Tutor: Foundation Programme

Admissions Tutor

DLL tutor Naomi
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Profile

I joined the Department for Lifelong Learning in September 2014. Before taking up my current position, I taught for five years in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, where I received a Birkbeck Distinguished Teaching and Scholarship Award. I have also taught at the University of Hertfordshire, Roehampton University, Queen Mary, University of London, and London Metropolitan University, where I held a Visiting Research Fellowship at The Women’s Library (then at Old Castle Street).

I am an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English and a member of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have a particular interest in Object Based Learning and Teaching and inclusive assessment.  In addition to my academic work, I have a background in supported housing and hold a Combined Certificate in Counselling Skills and Theory (Central School of Counselling and Therapy, London).

Qualifications
  • BA Theology and Religious Studies (Newnham College, Cambridge)
  • MA Victorian Literature (Manchester)
  • PhD New Women, New Testaments: Christian narrative and New Woman fiction (Southampton)
Research interests

My research interests are in religion and gender in popular literature and culture, mainly in the late-Victorian period, but I also have an ongoing interest in representations of religion and the Bible in the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003).

I co-lead the Gothic Bible Project with Mary Going in the School of English and co-organised Buffy and the Bible, a two-day interdisciplinary conference taking place at the University of Sheffield on 4-5 July 2019 and funded by WRoCAH and the International Gothic Association.

I am currently co-editing a special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal on Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture (with Ciare Stainthorp) due out in late 2023. 

Teaching activities

ACE0348 Foundations of English (module convenor)

ACE0340 Academic Literacy and Communication Skills

ACE0349 Extended Project

ACE1002 Culture, Language and Meaning

Publications

Books

Hetherington, Naomi (General ed.), Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society, a 4-vol annotated set of rare primary texts (Routledge 2020).

Hetherington, Naomi & Clare Stainthorp (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society, Vol 4. Disbelief and New Beliefs (Routledge 2020).

Hetherington, Naomi & Nadia Valman (eds.), Amy Levy: Critical Essays (Ohio University Press, 2010).

Special Issues

Victorian Review 37.2 (2011), special issue entitled ‘Late Nineteenth-Century Religion and Sexuality’ (co-edited with Joy Dixon).

Women: A Cultural Review 21.3 (2010), special issue entitled ‘Rethinking the History of Feminism’ (co-edited with the History of Feminism Collective).

Key Articles and Book Chapters

Hetherington, Naomi, ‘Freethought, feminism and sexual subjectivity in colonial New Woman fiction: Olive Schreiner and Kathleen Mannington Caffyn’, Victorian Review 37.2 (2011), pp. 47-59.

Hetherington, Naomi, ‘“A Jewish Robert Elsmere”? Amy Levy, Israel Zangwill and the post-emancipation Jewish novel’, in Amy Levy: Critical Essays ed. Naomi Hetherington & Nadia Valman (Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 180-197.

Hetherington, Naomi, ‘New Woman, “New Boots”: Amy Levy as Child Journalist’, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf ed. Christine Alexander & Juliet McMaster (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp 254-268.

Public Scholarship

New Women and the Gothic, Saturday guest lecture for Romancing the Gothic, 22 August 2020.

#VPFA Religion Twitter Taster for the VPFA Study Day on Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture, postponed due to Covid-19, 13 May 2020.