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Elizabeth Maslen, 2008. Listen: Elizabeth Maslen speaks about: Westfield College in the 1950s, Why she chose Westfield, Returning to Westfield : 'a question of loyalties', Men at Westfield, and merging with Queen Mary College, Women's fiction and social unjustice, Challenges faced by women in academia, and 'The teaching has mattered most' Listening Help

From 1954 to 1957, she attended Westfield College and earned a first class degree in English. She went on to pursue postgraduate study at Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned the Postgraduate Diploma in Indo-European Comparative Philology in 1959, having specialised in Germanic and Greek.

In 1959, Maslen returned to Westfield College, becoming Assistant Lecturer in the Department of English. Between 1961 and 1967, she taught at the University of Warsaw and University of Singapore, and then returned to Westfield initially as a Part-time Lecturer. From 1971-1991, she was Lecturer in English at Westfield, and in 1991 she was appointed Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield College.

Over the years, she has taught a wide range of courses, from Old and Middle English, Shakespeare, and Historicist approaches to literature, to poetry across cultures, Modernism, African-American women's writing, and women and politics in inter-war period. She has supervised over 20 doctoral students in subject areas including post-colonial literatures, women's writing, African fiction and postmodernism.

She has written numerous articles and other publications, including Doris Lessing (1994), Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction 1928-1968 (2001), "The miasma of Englishness at home and abroad" (2004), "Women Writers of World War Two" (2006) and "The Case for Storm Jameson" (2007). She is currently working on a critical biography of Storm Jameson.

She has acted as editor and translator of several publications, including as Associate Editor for the Year's Work in English Studies from 1972-75 and co-translator with John Maslen of Rudolf by Marian Pankowski (1996). She has also given guest lectures and participated in academic conference internationally.

Maslen saw various periods of change at the College throughout her career, including the admission of male students to Westfield from 1965, the merger with Queen Mary College in 1989 and the merging of Barts and The London medical schools with Queen Mary in 1992.

From 1986-1989 she was Chairman of Academic Staff Meeting at Westfield College, and participated in the merger negotiations with Queen Mary College. From 1993-94 she was involved with the committee responsible from drawing up qualifications for Senior Lecturers at Queen Mary and Westfield College.

In 1989, she became a member of the Executive Committee of Centre for European Studies and was a member of the Advisory Committee for the Institute of English Studies from 1993 until 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, she contributed to postgraduate teaching at the Institute of English Studies, where she was Course Tutor for the MA in National and International Literatures in English.

Maslen retired from Queen Mary in 2000, but is still active in teaching, examining and research activities, as well as contributing to the work of the Women at Queen Mary Project. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies and continues examining for the Open University in Singapore.