Dr Rosie Dub
Creative Writing Fellow
BA MA (Sheffield Hallam), PhD (Swinburne, Melbourne)
Contact
Email: rod17@aber.ac.uk
Office: A6
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621944
Personal Web Site:http://rosiedub.com/
Teaching Areas
Rosie is a novelist. She supervises PhD students in their Creative Writing programme.
Research
Rosie’s fiction is an extension of, but also a catalyst for her research interests, which draw from a range of academic disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, mysticism, anthropology and narratology. Rosie’s main research interests relate to story and its origins, structure and purpose. The major element of her PhD research (in both creative artefact and exegesis) was an exploration of how the structure of story provides a map of the 'journey to self' or the individuation process, as Jung called it. Rosie explored the notion that while stories do encourage us to conform by reinforcing the social order and prevailing attitudes, paradoxically they are also subversive, in that the very structure of story is a metaphoric map of the process of becoming oneself, a state in which the individual may live freely within society.
Related research interests include: the creative tension between memory and imagination; constructions of self and the question of an essential self; conflicting notions of truth in fiction and memoir. Rosie is also interested in contemporary shamanic novels, or novels/life writing which represent some form of esoteric initiation or journey.
Additional Interests
Rosie’s blog, Write on the Fringes (http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/) explores the art and craft of writing, as well as the nature and purpose of story.
Staff Publications
Rosie’s first novel, Gathering Storm, was published by Penguin in 2008. It has since been published in audio form and in the Netherlands. Set in London, the Malvern Hills and outback Australia, Gathering Storm is an exploration of memory, identity and dislocation in a personal sense, through family history and genetic inheritance, but also from a broader cultural perspective, in relation to nationhood and citizenship.
Her second novel, Flight was published by Fourth Estate in February 2012. With modern gothic undertones and drawing on myth and fairy tale, Flight is set between inner-city Sydney and the labyrinthine depths of the Tasmanian wilderness. It is a metaphysical thriller and a love story, as well as an exploration of personal identity and a strong social and environmental commentary.
A new novel, Nowhere Man, is almost complete. This is an existential novel about being unconsciously caught in negative patterns of behaviour. Set on the streets of London, it offers a stark and sometimes humourous critique of contemporary urban culture, and like her earlier novels, explores the nature of self, as well as concepts of society and statelessness; themes which are increasingly relevant to the world in which we live.
Rosie has also written and published short stories, essays and life writing, in anthologies, magazines, newspapers and literary journals. Her novel, Gathering Storm has recently been optioned by a film company and she is currently adapting it into a feature film script.