Associate Professor of Midwifery and Women’s Health, Dr Alys Einion first trained as a nurse in Bangor and then as a midwife at Thames Valley University and Ealing Hospital, London, where she gained a First Class Honours in her degree. She worked as a midwife and nurse in a range of settings, gathering a PGCE along the way and studying two MA programmes simultaneously, one in Professional Development, and the other in Creative Writing, before starting her academic career at UWE, Bristol in 2005, and then moving to Swansea in 2009, whilst studying her PhD part time at Aberystwyth University. She gained her PhD in 2012, studying the intersection between women’s life writing, fiction and representations of sexual violence.
Her main teaching responsibilities focus on issues relating to the psychosocial and political context of women’s lives, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, alongside the history, context and culture of midwifery and equality and diversity. She also supervises PhD students, and MA students in Education for Health Professions, Maternal and Child Health and contributes to post-graduate teaching in these areas. She contributes to modules in the Social Sciences and was instrumental in developing the new BA Social Sciences. Committed to excellence in teaching and learning, she has investigated innovative approaches to learning and assessment. She conceived of and developed the innovative HE Certificate in Maternity Care at Swansea University, a widening access programme which prepares students for careers in maternity care and health, and is an active and prolific writer, publishing regularly with The Practising Midwife Journal. Her research on student midwives’ learning journals and the language and narratives of midwifery has been presented to international audiences and published in a number of media, and she continues to research midwifery and maternal narratives and experiences. She is a midwife complementary therapist, hypnobirthing practitioner and is currently researching hypnobirthing and its impact on birth experiences.
She regularly contributes to books on midwifery and motherhood, and to books about LGBT+relationships and parenting.
Alys also worked for 10 years for the Open University in Wales, teaching the course SK277, Human Biology.
Alys is also a novelist, published by Honno Welsh Women’s Press www.honno.co.uk
