Professor Lara Feigel works on twentieth-century literature and culture. She is a literary critic and cultural historian and she is invested in finding new ways to represent the complex relationships between life, literature and history. As a result, much of her work crosses genres and disciplines.

Her most recent book, Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins, 2026), tells the history of child custody from 1800 to the present through a series of case studies: Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears. It is an ambitious attempt to bring together legal, cultural and social history, and is a formally ambitious work, experimenting with new forms of storytelling. The book ends with a chapter on the family courts in present day Britain, and Professor Feigel is committed to playing a role in documenting and driving legal change.

Professor Feigel has written five previous works of non-fiction. Her first monograph entitled Literature, Cinema, Politics, 1930-1945, Reading Between the Frames (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) tells the story that unfolded between 1920s cinematic modernism and postwar cinematic neorealism, exploring the rise and fall of a distinct genre of politically committed, cinematic literature.

Her second book entitled The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an experiment in life-writing, exploring the wartime lives and writing of five writers (Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel). In The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich she tells the complex story of how culture was used in the reconstruction of Germany, and of the effect postwar Germany had on the cultural ambassadors who were sent there.

Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury, 2018), is a work that fuses memoir, literary criticism and biography to investigate political, cultural, sexual and psychological freedom in Lessing’s life and work. She continued this blending of genres in her subsequent book, Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with D.H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury, 2021), which is an exploration of Lawrence’s life and literature, thinking about who is is to us in the twenty-first century.

In 2020, she published her first novel, The Group (John Murray), which is an essayistic investigation of contemporary women’s lives, loosely responding to Mary McCarthy’s The Group.

She is also the co-editor (with John Sutherland) of the New Selected Journals of Stephen Spender (Faber, 2012) and (with Alexandra Harris) of a collection of essays exploring modernist aesthetic responses to the seaside (Modernism on Sea, Peter Lang, 2009). Her research has been enabled by a five-year European Research Council Starting Grant (and a three year Phillip Leverhulme Prize. Professor Feigel is also the director of the Hub for Modern Literature and Culture and for a decade ran the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment (www.ivanjuritzprize.co.uk), which has been a collaboration with Granta and Mahler & LeWitt Studios, but is currently on pause.

Professor Feigel reviews regularly for the Guardian and sees these reviews as playing a crucial role in disseminating complex literary and critical ideas in the wider culture. She also has written recently for the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Observer. She also lectures frequently about her research and has delivered talks or keynote lectures in France, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Australia and India. And she appears regularly on Front Row, wrote and presented a programme about Doris Lessing for Archive on Four and contributed to the BBC Art that Made Us TV series.

Her official website: www.larafeigel.com

Research interests and PhD supervision

Currently Professor Feigel primarily supervises creative writing PhDs. She mainly supervises creative non-fiction projects, with occasional fiction projects. She occasionally takes on new academic PhDs in the following areas:

• Second World War lives and literature
• Feminist writing from the 1950s to the present, with a particular focus on motherhood and writing the self
• Life-writing and auto-fiction and the connections between experimental creative non-fiction and the novelistic tradition
• Doris Lessing, DH Lawrence