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.

She holds a number of key leadership and support roles, all of which allow her to embed her committment to equity and social justice, collabortation, and interdisciplinarity. These roles include EDI Lead for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Civic Fellow, and Research Director.

Gender, youth, feminist theory, creative (and) qualitative methods and cultural politics.

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

• Feminist Knowledge Production; including ethics, epistemologies 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 and/or in methodological design

Please note that I can only mentor a limited number of MRes, doctoral and post-doctoral applicants each application cycle. If you are seeking doctoral funding opportunities please note that I will be unable to work with new applicants in a primary supervisor capacity from the first of December but I may have reached capacity earlier than then - so please do get in contact early in the admissions cycle. Post-docs should contact me at least two months prior to UEA deadlines. All applicants should express a clear fit with my research expertise and interests. Please do not use AI (beyond a spell/punctuation check if that helps you to feel confident) to craft your correspondence, I want to hear from human beings in all your tentative, excitable and ultimately flawed glory.

I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose projects focus on gender, youth, and feminist theory and I am especially interested in questions of feminist knowledge production. 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. The third is as UK lead (alongside Dr Barbara Mitra) of the UK's contribution to the Global Media Monitoring Project which includes data collection, project management and report writing.

Beyond a focus on gender I am also particularly interested 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 the use of zines as modes of belonging and resistance. 

I have published extensively in the field of feminist cultural studies and have acted as a consultant expert to organisations such as Plan International 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:

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

Gabriel Markovich, A Digital Study of Trans Joy in Transgender Online Spaces

Sarah Jacques, Queering Militarism: Disrupting heteronormative masculinities and constructs of normative gender systems in architectural functions of a British Military Camp. 

Previously supervised doctoral students:

Dr Yixuan Duan, From Village to Digital Space: Southwestern Chinese Rural Women’s Self-Representation and Their Interactions with Kuaishou, An Algorithm-Based Social Media Platform

Dr Nathania Atkinson, Intricate Mastery - Black Female Creative Entrepreneurial Mothers of the Jamaican Diaspora Navigating Power, Positionality and Upward Mobility in Transatlantic Spaces

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:

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

Working-title: ‘Mamuna Salira’: understanding boys’ experience of school (dis)engagement in rural Malawi through participatory creative methods, (collaborative journal article with Dr Kate Jere, Janine Kayange, Hodges Zacharia)

I am currently working on the following projects:

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

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 politics and gender. She primarily teaches Feminist Research Methodologies on the MA in Gender Studies and at Foundation Year level where students are introduced to political ideologies, 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, youth cultures, and popular culture.

As a working-class scholar with AuDHD, 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.
• PhD, 'Appropriate Articulations of Taste: The (re)production of gender in contemporary youth taste cultures' Awarded 2014
• MA (with Distinction) Media and Cultural Politics; BA(hons) The Politics and Sociology of Contemporary Culture (First Class) – University of East Anglia

• Faculty of Arts and Humanities EDI Lead (2026 - present)
• Civic Fellow (2026 - present)
• EDI Lead, Doctoral Landscape Awards Hub led by King’s College London (2026 - present)
• Research Director, Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities, Sainsbury Research Unit for the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Sainsbury Institute for Japanese Arts and Culture, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (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)