Carol Atherton
Carol Atherton (1991, English) is Head of English at Spalding Grammar School in Lincolnshire. She has worked with a number of organisations, including NATE, the British Library, the Poetry Archive and the British Council, and she was made a Fellow of the English Association in 2009.
Carol graduated from the Hall with a First, and gained a doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 2003. A specialist in literary theory and pedagogy, she has written widely on the teaching of English Literature, curricular reform and the nature of disciplinary knowledge. Her work includes articles and teaching resources on tragic drama, pastoral poetry, the graphic novel and twentieth-century poetry, in particular the work of Philip Larkin. She is the author of Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880-2002 (Macmillan, 2005). She has also co-authored Teaching English Literature 16-19 (Routledge, 2013), the first full-length study of post-16 English Literature teaching written in over 25 years, and A/AS Level English Literature B for AQA (CUP, 2015), a textbook for A level English Literature students. An adoptive parent, she is currently working on a more personal book about adoption.
