Victoria Cann

Dr Victoria (Tori) Cann's teaching, research and outreach interests lay in gender politics and feminist theory and she is particularly interested in feminist knowledge production. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Tori works across the humanities and social sciences, drawing a particular critical focus on culture. As a teacher, Tori is keen for students to discover what they care about and to channel that passion into curiosity. As a working-class scholar, Tori is particularly keen to elevate voices underrepresented in the academy.

Tori's first book Girls Like This: Boys Like That was released with IB Tauris in 2018 and she has published chapters in edited collections and articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Boyhood Studies, Girlhood Studies and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. She sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Gender Studies and Boyhood Studies and is an Executive Team member of the Gender and Education Association. In 2020 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Gender, youth, feminist theory, qualitative methods and cultural politics.

If you are considering a research collaboration, PhD or postdoc, I am happy work on/with projects related to:

• Feminist Knowledge Production; including ethics and methodological design
• Gender and Youth; including gender performance, girlhoods and boyhoods, trans and non-binary youth experiences, the (re)production of the gender binary, understandings of contemporary youth femininities and youth masculinities
• Feminist Movements; especially contemporary feminist activism and/or the relationship between popular culture and feminism, but also keen to work on histories in joint-supervision contexts
• Zines and DIY activist cultures; particularly those that advance understandings of resistance

I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose projects focus on gender, youth, and feminist theory. My key research interests are around the reproduction of gender, and discourses of femininity and masculinity more specifically. My exploration of these topics largely involves the collection of empirical data with young people, adults who provide provision for young people and/or media/cultural outputs that represent or speak to young audiences. 

My work is often project based and I regularly work as part of a team. I am currently working on three projects, one is part of a team exploring boys’ disengagement from education and my role is to provide insight into British youth masculinities and the application of masculinity theory to a range of global contexts. Another project is a theoretical one that examines the cultural intelligibility of femininity, particularly under patriarchy and considers how this plays out within the academic field of girlhood studies. 

Beyond a focus on gender I am also particularly interest in feminist research methodologies and epistemologies. This involves research exploring creative methods - particularly those that use zines and/or zine making as a resources. As such I have published work on working class belonging within higher education and modes of resistance. 

I have published extensively in the field of feminist cultural studies and has acted as a consultant expert to organisations such as Plan UK and the Women's Equality Party.

I have examined a number of PhD and MRes vivas and transfer review panels internal to UEA and am open to invitations to undertake such examinations externally.

Current projects I am supervising:

Nathania Atkinson, Intricate Mastery – How Love, Vision, and Perseverance and Hip Hop culture impact Black female creative entrepreneurial mothers of the Caribbean diaspora in the U.K navigating Power, Positionality and Upward Mobility 

Yixuan Duan, Understanding the Representations of Chinese Southwest Rural Women on Kuaishou

Mitra Tanomand, Exploring Educational Exclusion of Girls in Rural Afghanistan: A Qualitative Study

Previously supervised doctoral students:

Dr Hua Ma, Becoming “beautiful”: beauty practices and female beauty in contemporary China a feminist perspective on beauty culture

Current Research Projects

I am currently working on the following outputs:

'Figuring It Out: Navigating, Producing and Communicating Working-Class Knowledges in and through feminist zine making', with Carys Hill (University of Warwick) for the forthcoming Routledge book Working-Class Knowledge(s) in the Academy: Theory, Practice and Method (edited by Dr Carli Ria Rowell).

Working-title: De-essentialising Girlhood Studies: An exploration of the cultural intelligibility and academic operationalisation of femininity within girlhood studies (journal article)

Girlhood Studies, encyclopedia entry for the Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies Series.

I am currently working on the following projects:

Global Media Monitoring Project, UK and Ireland regional lead with Dr Barbara Mitra (University of Worcester)

TYKES: Towards developing understandings of Young Kid’s digital literacies in the Early years foundation Stage (PI's Dr Harry Dyer and Dr Simon Hammond with lead researcher Dr Laura Jennings-Tallant full team here)

Lifting barriers: Educated boys for gender equality (Technical Lead: UNESCO, with Equimundo and University of East Anglia as partners)

Tori's teaching expertise is in the field of cultural studies. She primarily teaches Feminist Methodologies on the MA in Gender Studies and at Foundation Year level where students are introduced to research methodologies, key concepts in the humanities and study skills. She often provides guest lectures on the topic of feminism and gender studies on modules across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Tori is interested in supervising dissertations and research projects in the area of identity (particularly the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality), feminism(s), cultural politics, and popular culture.

As a working-class scholar, Tori is especially committed to teaching and encouraging the learning of students from a diverse range of backgrounds, particularly those from under-represented and minoritised groups in higher education.

In 2015 Tori was awarded the UEA Excellence in Teaching Award and in 2020 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

• Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Humanities, Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities, University of East Anglia, Sept 2020 – Present.
• Lecturer in Humanities, Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities, University of East Anglia, Sept 2013 – Present.
• Lecturer in Popular Culture, Department of English, Communication, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University, Spring 2013.
• Lecturer in Politics and Media, School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia Autumn, 2011.
• Associate Tutor, School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia, January 2010 – September 2013.
• MA (with Distinction) Media and Cultural Politics; BA(hons) The Politics and Sociology of Contemporary Culture (First Class) – University of East Anglia

Research Director, Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities (2025 - present)

HUM Peer Review College (2024 - present)

Course Director MA Gender Studies (2019 - 2025) 

Placement Officer (2018 - 2019)

Employability Director (2015 - 2019)

Enterprise and Engagement Officer (2015 - 2018)

Plagiarism Officer (2014 - 2016)