Dr Wootton was to have travelled to Menton, France, in August to take up the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, but that trip was postponed because of Covid-19 safety risks.
A former physiotherapist and acupuncturist, and a former Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, she was also to have graduated from the university with a PhD at a ceremony on Wednesday.
However, the planned event at the Dunedin Town Hall was called off for security reasons, as all other Otago graduation ceremonies this month have been.
"It’s good to be finished," she said about her thesis.
Having earlier queued to pick up her graduation regalia, she was celebrating the outcome this week, despite the lack of a formal ceremony.
She would also be able to take up the Menton fellowship later, when it was possible to do so.
The fellowship involves three months or more of access to a writing room in the Villa Isola Bella in Menton, in southern France, where Katherine Mansfield once wrote.
Dr Wootton has successfully completed her PhD thesis, while based in the Centre for Scottish and Irish Studies and in the university’s department of general practice.
Her thesis is titled "Life sentences: Articulating recoveries in fiction and nonfiction narrative prose".
Through her research, she had explored how "literary explorations of mobility and immobility offer resources for wellbeing in real life".
In her research she had read stories linked to New Zealand’s polio epidemics, which had helped her understand more clearly the Covid-19 pandemic early this year.
She highlighted the importance of literary works.
"It’s about values and meaning and how they make sense of our world," she said..
