Rebecca Mills

Dr Rebecca Mills

  • Senior Lecturer in Communications and English
  • WH
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Biography

Rebecca Mills completed her PhD 'Post-World War II Elegy and the Geographic Imagination' at the University of Exeter in 2014 (supported by a grant from the European Social Fund). She has kept her interest in literary geography and spatiality, and navigating death and its rituals, but pivoted towards an interest in space, bodies, and memory in crime narratives, gothic literature, and children's and YA fiction. She also has an interest in popular culture--particularly celebrity studies and TV sitcoms--and how popular culture deals with themes of out-of-placeness, fragmented identity, and transgression.

Rebecca is currently working on a monograph that takes a medical humanities perspective to modern crime narratives, under contract with the University of Wales Press Intersections in Literature and Science series.

Rebecca welcomes PhD supervision enquiries on topics including but not limited to the following:

- Crime and detective fiction (literature, film, TV)

- Space and geography in literature...

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Journal Articles

Books

Chapters

  • Mills, R., 2024. Far From the Madding Crowd: Modernity, Community, and the Rural Imagination in Schitt’s Creek. In: Deys, K., Deys, J. and Anderson, N.N., eds. Class, Identity, and Finding the Right Wine in Schitt's Creek: A Place to Love. Rowman & Littlefield / Lexington Books.
  • Mills, R. and McInnes, A., 2022. "An Elaborate Cover”: Staging Identities at School and Abroad in Robin Stevens’s Murder Mysteries. In: Russell, D., ed. Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature. University Press of Mississippi.
  • Mills, R., 2022. The Middlebrow Woman Detective Author. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie. 47-66.
  • Mills, R., 2020. Victims. The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. 149-158.
  • Mills, R., 2019. Detecting the Blitz: Trauma and Memory in Christie’s Post-War Writings. In: Mills, R. and Bernthal, J.C., eds. Agatha Christie Goes to War. Routledge.
  • Mills, R., 2019. Detecting the blitz: Memory and trauma in Christie’s postwar writings. Agatha Christie Goes to War. 137-154.
  • Mills, R., 2016. 'England’s Pockets: Objects of Anxiety in Agatha Christie’s Post-War Novels'. In: Bernthal, J.C., ed. The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy. McFarland & Co., 29-44.
  • Bright, B. and Mills, R., 2016. The revelations of the corpse: Interpreting the body in the golden age detective novel. New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified. 32-51.

Profile of Teaching PG

  • Markets and Audiences (MA in English and Literary Media)
  • Culture and Controversy (MA in English and Literary Media) guest lecture: "Teenage Kicks: Sex, Queerness, and Young Adult Cultures"
  • Narrating Identities (MA in English and Literary Media)
  • Dissertation supervision (MA in Media and Communication)
  • Dissertation supervision (MA in English and Literary Media)

Profile of Teaching UG

  • Celebrity Culture (BA Communication and Media, Level 6 option)
  • Crime and Terror (BA English, Level 6 option)
  • Narrative Structures (BA English and BA Communication and Media, Level 5)
  • Children's Literature (BA English, Level 5)
  • Media: Messages and Meanings (BA English and BA Communication and Media, Level 5) guest lecture: Villains & Victims: Crime and Gender in Media and Culture
  • Adaptation (BA English and BA Communication and Media, Level 4 ) guest lecture: Adapting Fictions and Fantasies: The Case of Agatha Christie
  • Dissertation supervision (BA Communication and Media)
  • Forms and Contexts (BA English level 4)
  • Gender and Sexuality (BA English, level 5)

Internal Responsibilities

Journal Reviewing/Refereeing

  • Clues: a journal of detection, Anonymous peer review, 01 Apr 2021

Public Engagement & Outreach Activities

  • Literature and Law: Creative Crime Writing Workshop 2024 (11 May 2024)
  • Art, Artefacts and Curios in Victorian Gothic Stories (Russell-Cotes Museum and Art Gallery, November 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMFXc-iMZSA&t=3s (09 Nov 2022)

Conference Presentations

  • Literatures and Laws Online Symposium, Organiser/panel chair, 13 Apr 2024, Bournemouth University (online)
  • Hardy and Gothic Wessex, A Map is Not all the Plot': Unhomely Houses and Liminal Landscapes in Gladys Mitchell's Awkward Gothic Wessex, 28 Oct 2022, Dorchester / Virtual
  • Agatha Christie: Investigating the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie Goes to War (keynote given with J.C. Bernthal), 05 Sep 2019, Solent University, Southampton
  • The Ninth International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference 2018, Figuring Fictions And Fractures: Trauma, Memory, And The Mystery Of Agatha Christie, 27 Jun 2018, Bournemouth University
  • Captivating Criminality 4: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present, ‘“Los Angeles is too big”’: Foggy cartographies in Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), 29 Jun 2017, Bath Spa University, Corsham Court
  • Agatha Christie: A Reappraisal, ‘Detecting the Blitz: Trauma and Amnesia in Agatha Christie’s Post-War Novels’, 19 Jun 2017, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University

Attended Training

  • Writing and presenting for non-academic audiences (RKEO 'Pathways to Impact' workshop), 12 Jul 2018

Qualifications

  • PhD in English Literature (University of Exeter, 2014)
  • MA in Twentieth-Century Literary Studies (Durham University, 2010)
  • MA in English Philology (University of Helsinki, Finland, 2009)
  • BA in English Philology with British and Irish Studies (University of Helsinki, Finland, 2008)

External Media and Press