01 about
Catherine Riley is a feminist historian and writer, and an expert on contemporary feminist publishing in the UK. She has taught English Literature and Gender Studies at Lancaster and Northumbria Universities and Birkbeck College in London, where she completed her doctoral thesis on the feminist publisher Virago.
Catherine has published two books on women's writing and publishing, and has contributed chapters and articles to edited collections on these themes.
She worked for two years as Head of Communications at the Women’s Equality Party, the UK’s first feminist political party, helping build it from the ground up before leaving at the conclusion of the 2017 general election.
Catherine now works as general manager for the Primadonna Festival, a festival of writing, creativity and ideas celebrating diversity, inclusivity and equality, while continuing to write about trends in gender theory and praxis, particularly as they apply to publishing and social change.
02 books
Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction (with Lynne Pearce) was published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2018.
It was followed in May 2018 by The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon, published by Berghahn Books.
Forthcoming is the collection Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Contemporary Period, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
