Hello
A Bit About Me
Nic Hilton is a PhD Candidate in Education, Children’s and YA Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the works of author Patrick Ness and his representation of maturation.
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She is currently employed as an academic Supervisor at the University of Cambridge. The UG topics she has covered include children's literature, young adult literature, poetics, aesthetics, and criticism of a broad historical range of English literature, literature and education, and comparative literature. Nic is also working as an undergraduate dissertation supervisor within the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and has supervised a project focused on voice, pedagogy, and Harry Potter.
Along with supervising, Nic is also employed as a PhD Invigilator at the Faculty of Education Library at the University of Cambridge. This role allows her to assist students and staff from a wide range of disciplines, guiding them to the find the relevant material they require and helping them with their research skills. Prior to her time at Cambridge, she also worked in the libraries at Trinity College Dublin where she undertook her MPhil in Children’s Literature.
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As an active member of the University community, she has contributed to the Faculty of Education Research Student Association (FERSA) as the Welfare Officer for two years. She was also part of the team who built the social media accounts for the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge (CRCLC) and held the position of the Centre’s Blog Editor (2018-2019) and Instagram Officer (2018-2020). She was also Co-Chair for the Education Society at Wolfson College in 2019. Drawing on skills from her previous profession she has implemented the Wolfson College branded clothing range in 2019 and continues to manage the range. In her free time she likes to sing in the Wolfson College Choir and is teaching herself to draw (all artwork on the website has been designed by Nic).
In May 2021, Nic hosted an international conference – ‘Let’s Talk about Sex in YA’ – along with two of her colleagues. The conference was originally planned to be held in-person at the University of Cambridge in September 2020, however due to COVID-19 it had to be postponed and moved online. Moving the conference online completely opened up accessibility. Due to funding obtained from the Cambridge AHRC-DTP and the University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the conference was able to be offered free of charge. It was a huge success; the conference had nearly 600 registrations along with 50 speakers from all over the world, including Australia, Europe, Saudi Arabia, India, China, North and South America. More information about the conference can be found here.
Over the past year, Nic has been invited for several guest lectures at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In these lectures she discussed ideas of boyhood and girlhood in Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy, representations of maturation, and subverting literary tropes in Ness’s The Rest of Us Just Live Here.
Nic was awarded the Mary Hesse Studentship in Arts and Humanities from Wolfson College, Cambridge for 2018-2020 and a grant from the Funds for Women Graduates in 2020-2021. In 2020, she was awarded a mentorship from the International Research Society of Children’s Literature with Dr Alison Waller.
Prior to her adventures in academia, Nic was a business graduate and worked in several big company head offices in buying and merchandising.
