Want to know a bit more about what your Literature lecturers are researching and publishing on? Come along to our very first Research Showcase to find out!
Book your ticket here.
Six members of the Literature team will be offering short 10 minute presentations on their current research. Come and enjoy a glass of wine, and learn a bit more about political writing, punk memoir, Caribbean food, Maria Aberg, the Brontes, and women’s history in York.
- Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh will be speaking about her Culinary Cultures research network and research for her forthcoming monograph Food, Text and Culture in the Caribbean (2019), as well as ‘Kitchen-Talk’, her latest oral history project based in the Caribbean.
- Dr Adam Smith will be explaining Whig literary culture in eighteenth-century print culture. Since literary success also equated to political success, leading Tory writers went about forming a literary canon reflective of their own politics whilst self-consciously erasing the writing of their political rivals: the Whigs. Resultantly, Whig literary culture has historically been absent from studies of this period. Adam’s research recovers the story of that literature, examining what it was like, how it worked and ultimately, why it lost the battle for posterity.
- Dr Fraser Mann will be discussing the research he is collaborating on with Dr Rob Edgar and Dr Helen Pleasance from the York Centre from Writing. Together, they are examining and exploring the newly emergent trend for literary music memoirs. These are texts that play with remembered and constructed cultural and creative lives. Punks and indie provocateurs of the last thirty years are now experimenting with text with the same vigour and intensity that they have long applied to sound and song.
- Julie Raby often works in archives watching the lift from Dirty Dancing on a loop, and exploring the moves in the brutal fights inspired by Fight Club. She finds herself thinking about My Best Friend’s Wedding, fashion shows in Milan and the Duckie at the Vauxhall Tavern. Julie’s research focuses on Contemporary Shakespeare Performance, and her current work explores Maria Aberg’s work at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She uses an eclectic range of approaches to research, having come from an Art History and Literature background, and having a passionate interest in theatre.
- Dr Jo Waugh will be speaking about the Brontes and contagion debates in the 1840s. Branwell, Emily, and Anne died, and Emily, Anne, and Charlotte wrote most of their most well-known works in the late 1840s when contagion discourse is usually considered to have been very much out of favour, and ‘miasma’ and sanitation measures the dominant way of understanding disease. Jo suggests that the Brontes in fact frequently either invoke or challenge contagion and contagionist discourse. She will also trouble some of the critical assumptions about the diseases which were rife in the period: was consumption really ‘chic’, or is this a retrospective construction which implicitly ignores working-class experience of the disease, for example?
- Dr Kaley Kramer will be discussing her research about the history of York and specifically, the important role that women have played in the development of the city. Kaley will be talking about Ann Ward, a female pioneer in the world of print culture.