Natalie Emma Ilsley
watercolour artist + doctoral researcher
I was born and raised in a small English town in the Midlands. In 2015, I completed my undergraduate degree in English and American Literatures at Keele University, graduating with first class honours and winning the best dissertation for a thesis on mimicry, madness, and agency in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
After graduating from Keele, I completed a 6-month internship with Newsweek in London. I then went on to study International and European Politics at the University of Edinburgh, working part-time and graduating with a Merit. In 2018, I was awarded an Arts & Humanities Research Council +3 studentship to research resilience and migration in Stoke-on-Trent at the University of Manchester. My supervisors are Dr Anastasia Valassopoulos and Professor Mariangela Palladino.
In 2021, I was a Visiting Doctoral Fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre (MLC) at Ryerson University, working with Dr Irene Gammel, thanks to a doctoral exchange scheme funded by the UKRI and Mitacs. In 2020, I worked with Code-Switch Consultants to deliver a research consultancy project for In Place of War as part of the University of Manchester’s Business Challenges programme funded by the ESRC NPIF Accelerating Business Collaboration scheme.
Natalie Emma Designs 