Ella Fincken

Ella Fincken was born in Essex, England in 2001. She completed her bachelor’s degree in English Literature at the University of Exeter in 2022, with a dissertation on the exclusion of the female voice from First World War canonical poetry. This thesis discussed the ways in which women, despite forced exclusion, employed domestic representations of their war experience to actively insert themselves into the reaction and response to the war and to the dominant sexual discourses of the period.

Ella’s academic interests have always centered on the interrelation of history and literature, which in university encouraged a passion for the various ways literature responds to historical events and discourses. As with her dissertation, she focused her research on underrepresentation in literature and the suppression of, particularly female, voices.

Outside of university, Ella enjoys writing both poetry and short stories of her own, with a published poem in the Charles Causley Literary Blog: The Maker. Her current academic interest furthers her university research to consider how damaging sexual and colonial legacies, structures, and discourses remanifest themselves in the present.

Her main specialty areas are:

• Poetry
• Gender studies
• Historical literature
• Postcolonial literature