‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano

Niamh Lawlor on 12/02/2025

With guest speaker Professor Simon Bainbridge

Seminar

Wednesday 19th March, Arts Building, University of Birmingham, Arts Room 201, 3-5pm

Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Professor Simon Bainbridge expert in Romanticism, the politics of place and mountaineering in this seminar hosted in collaboration with the Nineteenth Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. Simon will give his talk during the first hour; followed by refreshments and conversation. 

Simon Bainbridge is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Simon’s extensive work in the field of Romanticism has involved close research into the relationship between the movement and the historic contexts that surround it. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). In this seminar we will hear about Simon’s recent research exploring global mountaineering in the Romantic-period, focusing on accounts of ascending Hawaii’s highest volcanoes.  

Simon introduces his subject here:

‘This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.’

 

Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Niamh Lawlor on 17/01/2025

Manchán Magan, 2020

Recommended by Niamh Lawlor

Writer, broadcaster and advocate for the Irish language, Manchán Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape provides an engrossing introduction to the history of one of Europe’s oldest vernacular languages. Combining an exploration of the etymological origins of words that survive in new forms in contemporary spoken Irish, as well as those that have fallen out of use, Magan provides an insight into how words – regardless of the context they are used in today – continue to contain concepts that provide us with an insight into how people of the past understood the surrounding landscape.

Beginning with an exploration of the (at least) 32 words found in the language to denote a field – Magan demonstrates the specificity through which people understood their surroundings. For example, was the field in question a ‘Cuibhreann – a tilled field worked in partnership with a neighbour’, or a ‘Cluain’ – a meadow field between two woods, or ‘a bánóg, a patch of ground levelled out by years of dancing’? Exploring the richness of the Irish vocabulary through consideration of land, sea, weather, astronomy, and place names sees the landscape and the worldviews of those who knew their surroundings most intimately reanimated – offering a rare and valuable insight into the complex and nuanced worldview of the local people who shaped this unique vernacular.

 

Niamh Lawlor

Niamh Lawlor on 05/02/2022


Niamh Lawlor

Arts of Place Research Assistant and PhD Researcher – Department of English Literature

 

NXL744@student.bham.ac.uk

 

 

 

Throughout my reading life, I have often found myself as intrigued by an author’s apparently passing reference to the name of a town, village, church, landmark, road or field name as the events unfolding in the work itself. Over the past few years much of my reading has been accompanied by examinations of OS maps and regional history books in an attempt to discover the reality behind places they describe as well as the lives of the communities at their heart. Exploring the local histories and the evolving physical status of the spaces writers are drawn to rarely fails to offer unpredictable insights into their wider creative choices and has instilled within me an awareness of just how much local history has to offer in vividly enhancing examinations of place writing.

My PhD research foregrounds the localities that surround a selection of pre-historic and ancient monuments across the UK and Ireland. Focused on the first half of the twentieth century, my project employs a ‘ground up’ research approach which prioritises gaining an insight into the evolving physical and cultural status of specific monument sites throughout the period as well as how these landmarks were understood and interacted with by the local people living closest to them. This provides a starting point from which to explore how writers of the period creatively respond to these elusive and mysterious spaces in both fiction and non-fiction works. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which enthusiasm for these antiquities gained momentum during the first half of the century and how contemporary writing was increasingly seen to advocate for the importance of embodied and self-guided interactions with the sites.

Louise Kenward

Niamh Lawlor on 23/01/2021

Writer, Artist, Psychologist

Louise Kenward

Writer, Artist, Psychologist
PhD Candidate, Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University

lmkenward@icloud.com

https://footnotepress.com/books/moving-mountains/

Louise Kenward is a writer, psychologist, and artist living in East Sussex with post-viral illness. She is currently a PhD candidate with the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis is investigating the south coast of the Romney Marshes. As one of the most at risk areas in the UK for flooding, this stretch of shore takes Louise on 12 beach walks from Pett in East Sussex to Hythe in Kent, making monthly trips to beachcomb. Objects collected and observations made inform her writing practice, holding a lens of environmental and disability justice. This practice-based thesis is informed by the flotsam and jetsam that washes up, connecting place with person in the wider context of rising sea levels and post-viral illness.

She edited a first of its kind anthology, published in 2023 by Footnote, Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability. Moving Mountains includes work by writers Kerri Andrews, Polly Atkin, Sally Huband, Khairani Barokka, Eli Clare, Kate Davis, Hannah Hodgson, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Alec Finlay. It is a collection of 26 poems, essays, and prose exploring the small to the vast and is due out in paperback on 6th March 2025.

Louise was selected in the top 10 for Media and Publishing, in the 2023/2024 Disability Power 100. She is currently working on her first full length manuscript, A Trail of Breadcrumbs: a personal history of convalescence, a journey around the world accompanied by nineteenth century women travellers.