Sarah Prescott

Sarah Helen Prescott is Professor of English Literature at Aberystwyth University and a non-fiction writer, specializing in the history of English-language Welsh literature. She is also the director of the university's Institute of Literature, Languages and Creative Arts (ILLCA).

Biography

After earning a B.A. at the University of York, Prescott continued her studies at the University of Exeter where she received a PhD in 1997 with a thesis titled Feminist Literary History and British Women Novelists of the 1720s. Since the mid-1990s she has been an educator at Aberystwyth University where she has also conducted research into women's poetry, Welsh writing in English, and women's writing in Wales. In addition to two books on 18th-century female writers, she has contributed to journals including Modern Philology, Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Notes and Queries. She serves on the editorial board of Literature Compass and is a member of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies covering work in the English Departments of Aberystwyth and the University of Wales, Bangor. She has also collaborated with Professor Jane Aaron of the University of Glamorgan on the third volume of the Oxford Literary History of Wales which covers "Welsh Writing in English, 1536–1914".

Prescott is also Director of Aberystwyth University’s Institute of Literature, Languages and the Creative Arts (ILLCA) which comprises the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. In collaboration with Aberystwyth University's Welsh and Celtic Studies Department, the University of Edinburgh and the National University of Ireland, Galway, since February 2013 she has been involved in a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on "Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 from Ireland, Scotland and Wales in Irish, English, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh".

Selected works

• Prescott, Sarah Helen (1997). Feminist literary history and British women novelists of the 1720s. University of Exeter. 
• Prescott, Sarah (2003). Women, Authorship and Literary Culture 1690 - 1740. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-4039-0323-5. 
• Prescott, Sarah (2008). Eighteenth-century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-2053-2. 

Awards

In 2013, Prescott was awarded the M. Wynn Thomas Prize for her essay "Archipelagic Coterie Space: Katherine Philips and Welsh Women’s Writing".