Carolyn Cummings-Osmond is a writer and literary historian specialising in women’s lives, widowhood, life writing, and the ways in which private experience intersects with public history.
After a 24-year career as a Senior Lecturer in English at Solent University, Southampton, she now focuses on writing and historical research. Her longstanding research into widowhood has examined its representation in literature, biography and popular culture, and she has presented papers on the subject at academic conferences, including those of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and the University of Aberdeen.
She is currently writing The Assassin’s Wife and the Police Officer’s Widow: The Forgotten Lives of Marina Oswald and Marie Tippit, November 22, 1963 and Beyond, a narrative non-fiction work exploring the lives of two very different women whose histories became entwined with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Her wider interests include women’s history, archival research, life writing, literary and cultural history, and narrative non-fiction. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Royal Society of Literature.