Women, 'Failure' and Academia

This open access book examines failures in contemporary academia, and especially the intersections between gender and academic failure.

It argues that academic failure is political, and that seemingly personal failures to achieve a standard or expected academic career (tenure, funding, publications, etc.) should be understood in the context of institutional failures and systemic inequalities. Through theoretical discussions and/or personal reflections on their individual experiences of failure, contributors to the volume address how academic failure can illuminate, and sometimes subvert, the institutional barriers often faced by women and women-identifying scholars in the contemporary university.

The collection is interdisciplinary, intersectional and international and covers topics such as Covid-19, precarity and job hunting, ethnic diversity, accounts of incomplete research, motherhood and disability within the academy. Contributors include established and emerging scholars in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the UK and the USA. Conceived as scholarly activism, Women, 'Failure' and Academia aims to interrogate the future of universities and challenge perceptions of failure, especially with regard to women and women-identifying academics.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Marina Cano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Valencia, Spain. She is the author of Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Novels on the Stage (2026).

Rosa García-Periago is Senior Lecturer at the University of Murcia, Spain. She is co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019) and Women and Indian Shakespeares (2022) and has published extensively on Indian Shakespeares in Shakespeare, Adaptation, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Borrowers and Lenders, Atlantis and other journals.