Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing, Kingston University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Overview
Dr Vesna Goldsworthy is the founding Director of the Centre for Suburban Studies, Reader in English and Creative Writing at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Before joining Kingston in September 2000, Vesna worked as a producer for the BBC World Service and taught at British and US universities, including St Lawrence (New York) and Bucknell (Pennsylvania). She has acted as external examiner at Birmingham University, the University of Strathclyde, and Trinity College Dublin.
She is currently studying representations of contemporary suburbia in fiction, film and the media. She has contributed to a range of factual programmes on suburbia on radio and television, including the BBC radio and TV channels, Channel Four, Sky TV and many others, as well as national and international press.
Dr Goldsworthy is on the advisory board of UCL's Successful Suburban Town Centres project. She has acted as a consultant on a range of suburb-related issues for the media, PR and financial institutions. Recent consultancies include the BBC, TeamSpirit PR and Chesham Building Society.
Her book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale University Press, 1998) has been translated into four languages. Her memoir Chernobyl Strawberries was published in English (Atlantic) in March 2005. It was serialised in the Times and read by Vesna as Book of the Week on Radio Four. It has been translated into German, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Serbian and has been a bestseller in several European countries. Dr Goldsworthy's work has also appeared in books published by MIT Press, Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Manchester UP, Macmillan, Routledge, Anthem Press, and a range of European editions.
She is currently developing and mapping a two-volume cultural history of the English Suburb, to be edited with Gail Cunningham and David Kynaston. She is currently supervising PhDs in life writing, ethnicity, identity and British and North American representations of suburbia in gay fiction.
Research
Books:
- Writing Worlds 1: The Norwich Exchanges, Norwich: Pen & Inc Press, April 2006. ISBN 1902913264
- Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir, London: Atlantic, March 2005. pp. 290, ISBN 1843544148
- Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1998, ISBN 0300073127.
Papers:
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2006) The Balkans in nineteenth-century British travel writing.3 In: Youngs, Tim, (ed.) Travel writing in the nineteenth century: filling the blank spaces. London, UK : Anthem Press. pp. 19-35. (Anthem nineteenth century studies) ISBN 1843312182
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2006) Chernobyl strawberries: a memoir.4 Paperback ed. London, UK : Atlantic Books. 311p. ISBN 1843544156
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2006) The trouble with belonging: an afterword.5 In: Goldsworthy, Vesna, (ed.) Writing worlds 1: The Norwich exchanges. Norwich, UK : Pen and Inc Press. pp. 160-165. ISBN 1902913264
Goldsworthy, Vesna, ed. (2006) Writing worlds 1: The Norwich exchanges.6 Norwich, UK : Pen and Inc Press. 176p. ISBN 1902913264
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2005) Book review of: "A form foredoomed to looseness": Henry James's preoccupation with the gender of fiction by Cecile Mazzucco-Than.7 English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 48(4), pp. 489-492. ISSN (print) 0013-8339
Goldsworthy, Vesna and Mandelkow, Miriam (2005) Heimweh nach Nirgendwo: Eine Lebensgeschichte.8 Germany : Deuticke im Zsolnay Verlag. 224p. ISBN 3552060022
Dixon, Paul and Goldsworthy, Vesna (2004) Embracing suburbia.9 Planning in London, 50, pp. 33-34. ISSN (print) 1366-9672
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2004) The love that dares not speak its name: Englishness and suburbia.10 In: Rogers, David and McLeod, John, (eds.) The revision of Englishness. Manchester : Manchester University Press. pp. 95-106. ISBN 9780719069727
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2003) Der Imperialismus der Imagination: Konstruktionen Europas und des Balkans.11 In: Kaser, Karl , Gramshammer-Hohl, Dagmar and Pichler, Robert, (eds.) Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf. Klagenfurt, Germany : Wieser Verlag. pp. 253-274. (Wieser Enzyklopädie des Europäischen Ostens) ISBN 3851295110
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2002) Invention and in(ter)vention: the rhetoric of Balkanization.12 In: Bjelić, Dušan I. and Savić, Obrad, (eds.) Balkan as metaphor: between globalization and fragmentation. Cambridge MA, USA : MIT Press. pp. 25-38. ISBN 0262025248
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2001) Yugoslavia and former Yugoslav territories.13 In: Jolly, Margaretta, (ed.) Encyclopedia of Life Writing. London, UK : Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 976-977. ISBN 157958232x
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2000) Literature: Eastern Europe.14 In: Kramarae, Cheris and Spender, Dale, (eds.) Routledge international encyclopedia of women: global women's issues and knowledge. London, UK : Routledge. pp. 1261-1264. ISBN 0415920914
Goldsworthy, Vesna (1999) The last stop on the Orient Express: the Balkans and the politics of British in(ter)vention.15 Balkanologie: Revue dâ€TMétudes pluridisciplinaires, 3(2), pp. 107-115. ISSN (print) 1279-7952
Goldsworthy, Vesna (1998) Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination.16 London, U.K. : Yale University Press. 254p. ISBN 9780300073126
Goldsworthy, Vesna (1997) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: Rebecca West's journey through the Balkans.17 Women: A Cultural Review, 8(1), pp. 1-11. ISSN (print) 0957-4042
Goldsworthy, Vesna (1997) Tennyson and Montenegro.18 The Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7(1), pp. 7-17. ISSN (print) 0082-2841
Areas of expertise