Jane Aaron (educator)


Jane Rhiannon Aaron is a Welsh educator, literary researcher and writer. Until her retirement in September 2011, she was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan in the south of Wales. She then became an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales. Aaron is known for her research and publications on Welsh literature and on the writings of Welsh women.

Biography and output

Jane Aaron was born on 26 September 1951 in Aberystwyth, to the philosopher Richard Ithamar Aaron and his wife Annie Rhiannon Morgan. She graduated in English at the University of Wales, Swansea,. She then studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a PhD in 1980.
In 1993, she was appointed Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She became Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd in 1999, remaining there until her retirement in 2011.
Since the early 1990s, Aaron has published a number of essays and books, and edited works for Honno, which specializes in works by Welsh women. In 1999 she edited Honno's anthology of short stories entitled, A View Across the Valley: Short Stories from Women in Wales 1850–1950. In 1998, she herself produced Pur Fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llen Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg. Written in Welsh, it gives an account of Welsh women in 19th-century Welsh literature, for which she received the Ellis Griffith Memorial Prize in 1999. She has also written Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity, for which she was awarded the Roland Mathias Prize in 2009.

Selected works