Elspeth Jajdelska

I studied English language and literature at Glasgow University and completed a PhD on seventeenth-century diaries at Leeds University in 1996. Then I worked as a fund manager for an Edinburgh firm for three years, before spending a year and a half at the Jagiellonian and Pedagogical Universities in Krakow, Poland. I came to Strathclyde in 2001. 

I have completed two books on the history of reading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In both I aim to reconnect the history of reading with the history of speech. I also research how cognitive science can help us to understand literary experience. To support this work I have completed an MSc in  Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition (2016, distinction).

I teach on the undergraduate BA degree in English literature. As well as core class teaching in first and second year, my upcoming and current options are 'Oral narratives and fairy tales', 'Theories of literature and wellbeing' and 'Literature, mind and brain'.