Academic Members – Arts of Place

Alexandra Harris

Alexandra Harris on 18/10/2022

Alexandra Harris

Professorial Fellow in English at the University of Birmingham.

I remember feeling very eccentric in GCSE English lessons when friends complained about all the descriptions in Far From the Madding Crowd and wanted to skip ahead to the plot. The descriptions were the plot I thought. I was hazy about the order of human events, but the fern-grown hollow, the dangerous clover field, the ridge against the sky on which an occasional small figure would appear moving steadily on an unknown journey – all this was more real to me than the room I sat in. I was learning to read rooms as well though, and not only those ancient and easily romanticised ones I already cared about but bungalow paradises, city hotels, and the portacabin next to the astro-turf where those first encounters with life-changing literature unfolded. Twenty-five years later I’m very glad to help bring together, in the Arts of Place network, a wealth of people who are thinking in careful, imaginative, informed and questioning ways about our surroundings.

Much of my research over the years has been concerned with the presence of the past, and especially the past as it appears in landscapes and buildings. I’m interested in reading as a form of conversation across time and space, and in the capacity of art to establish complex relationships with history’s voices, variously reviving and revising them. My first book Romantic Moderns (Thames & Hudson 2010; Guardian First Book Award, Somerset Maugham Award) argued that some of the most original work of the modernist period emerged not from wholesale rejection of inherited ideas and places, but in finding new forms that might stretch to include valued histories and new possibilities.

In Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies (Thames & Hudson 2015; shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and adapted in 10 parts for Radio 4), I wrote a version of English literary history told in terms of the different weathers that have preoccupied writers and indeed whole cultural milieus at certain times. The book is in part an elegy for a climate we won’t know again, but more than that, and more importantly at the present time, it addresses the power and complexity of weather as it is experienced, as it is imagined, and as it is shaped by the arts.

For the past several years I’ve been working on a different kind of place-related project, one which has propelled me into a great deal of new thinking and learning. In The Rising Down, to be published by Faber, I concentrate on a few square miles of West Sussex, and investigate what this place has looked like to people over time. The method of close geographical focus has meant that, as I think my way through history, I don’t reach for the famed and canonical but try to work from the ground up: who was here? It’s made me appreciate the extraordinary and sometimes underestimated research done by local historians, and the new perspectives that emerge when we forge connections between international and local thinking.

Many of my essays and reviews can be accessed from links on my website: www.alexandraharris.co.uk

Examples of my work on place

Romantic Moderns, Thames & Hudson, 2010

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“Above all this is a book about art and place. Its protagonists are always out looking at England and they invite us to follow in their tracks … They were taking possession of the particular and local. And, like Chaucer, they were collecting stories along the way.”

Weatherland, Thames & Hudson, 2015

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“So, by reading, I have tried to watch people watching the sky – and people feeling the cold and getting wet, and shielding their eyes from the sun. Virginia Woolf talked about biographers hanging up mirrors in odd corners to reflect their subjects in unexpected ways. I have tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it.

Time and Place, Little Toller, 2019

“I’m still imagining calendars: figures of the modern ‘labours of the months’ painted in blue on delft tiles, marks on a bedroom wall that tell the date from the moving square of light coming in at the window…”

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I worked with the arts and environment charity Common Ground, the publisher Little Toller, and contemporary artists to make a small book called Time and Place, published by Little Toller in 2019. This connects with a longer-term project of mine on the culture of the calendar, the seasons and the marking of time. I’m interested in all kinds of art that has played a role in creating days and months with character and association, making comprehensible shapes within the stream of time. Time and Place asks how time moves in particular localities. My text looks back at the history of local or site-specific calendars, and considers the many material forms they have taken.

Together, the University of Birmingham and Common Ground commissioned new calendrical work. Among the artists is the photographer Jem Southam. He traces intersections of cosmic, human, and bird time as he watches, night after night, year after year at a bend of the River Exe, becoming so deeply part of the place and its ecology that he can see patterns that might be invisible to others.

Ground Work: Writing on People and Places, ed. Tim Dee, Jonathan Cape, 2018

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My essay ‘The Marsh and the Visitor’ is about going home to the area of Sussex in which I grew up and realising how little I knew about it. It’s about the common quandary of being deeply attached to rural places while not belonging in them. It was the starting point for a concerted and sometimes overwhelming effort to learn some of the languages of the place and to bring to it something of my own.

The Feel of Things, Caught by the River, 2020

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“Item four pigs, item fourteen quarters of barley, item one dozen of napkins, item goods in the milkhouse: outside and inside, room by room, the items of lives are spelled out. In a great many cases this is the fullest account to survive of an individual’s existence. An account, literally: added up at the end.”

A commission from the superb Museum of English Rural Life in Reading prompted me to think about the objects listed in rural inventories. My response was published on the Caught by the River website, where you can also read poems by Melissa Harrison, commissioned for the same project.

Jessica Fay

Alexandra Harris on 18/10/2022

Jessica Fay

Teaching Fellow in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham

As a Wordsworthian, I am interested in the feelings and memories that become attached to specific places and how they are captured and communicated through literature. My first book,

Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford English Monographs; OUP, 2018), explores the poet’s extensive knowledge of the monastic history of the north of England which he imbibed from a series of eighteenth-century topographical studies and from numerous visits to the sites of ruins. Wordsworth’s interest in monastic history is not, therefore, strictly a matter of religious belief and practice; rather, it encompasses an appreciation for how the landscape was inhabited and shaped by his medieval forebears. Through his own intimate connection with that landscape, Wordsworth became part of a transhistorical community and shared in the quietude that had been observed at monastic sites for centuries. The book explores how this sense of place inflected the tone and style of the poetry Wordsworth produced between 1807 and 1822.

My second major project (funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship) considered the collaborative exchange between Wordsworth and his friend, the amateur landscape artist, patron, and co-founder of the National Gallery, Sir George Beaumont.

My edition of The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829 (Romantic Reconfigurations; LUP, 2021), reveals ways in which Beaumont’s neoclassical responses to landscape, on the one hand, and Wordsworth’s more local outlook, on the other, shaped one another as their friendship developed.

Sean Ketteringham

Sean Ketteringham on 05/02/2022

Sean Ketteringham

Research Associate, University of Birmingham
Postdoctoral Researcher, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

I am the Research Associate for ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’, Arts of Place’s British Academy-funded project. Between October 2023 and May 2024 I will be contributing to all aspects of Arts of Place and helping Alex and Jessica shape our new programme of events. We are setting out to explore the creative minds of those artists and writers who revolutionised how place, locality, community, and the natural world were observed and understood in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture.

My research interests are centred around artistic, architectural, and literary articulations of English national identity in relation to the terminal decline of the British Empire during the twentieth century. My doctoral research, completed at Oxford in 2022 under the supervision of Rebecca Beasley, explored these ideas through the cultural crucible of domestic space between 1910 and 1948. It spanned suburban developments, the picturesque, modernist homes, and architectural preservation. I’m currently turning this work into a monograph for Oxford University Press titled Architectures of Identity: English Modernism, Domesticity and Imperial Decline. My new project at the Henry Moore Institute, titled ‘Postwar Folk’, extends these concerns to the period after 1945 through an examination of the triangular bond between postwar sculpture, English folk art, and so-called ethnographic museum collections.

Thinking around deep time, heritage, place and locality is marbled throughout my research and I have regularly worked in the heritage sector and on research residencies including at the National Trust, the Twentieth Century Society, the John Latham Foundation (Flat Time House), Grizedale Arts, and the Charles Moore Foundation, Texas. Prior to my doctorate I received my BA in English at the University of Liverpool, and my MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute.

Adam Bridgen

Alexandra Harris on 12/09/2021

Adam Bridgen

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
University of Durham

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British labouring-class writing is my main area of research. Broadly, I’m interested in how labouring-class poets — those who had to work of a living, and who received little formal schooling — responded to the dramatic changes in social, economic, and environmental relations that were imbricated with Britain’s rise to imperial dominance in the period 1700-1830.

My first project in this vein was a DPhil at Oxford University: ‘Where blacks and whites in scorching valleys sweat’: British Labouring-Class Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1660-1800. This project considered how labouring-class poets wielded form and genre to write about their occupations, and how this insurgent poetics of work also created a space for remarkably early and critical imaginings of transatlantic slavery.

My current project, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, explores how working-class writers responded to the impacts of extractivism in their localities during the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780-1840. I’m interested in how a vicinity to and involvement in extractive industries might catalyse environmental understandings, resulting in environment understandings which radically differ from the transcendental vision of nature preferred by William Wordsworth. My first piece on this topic, considering the Shropshire shoemaker-poet James Woodhouse’s apocalyptic take on agricultural improvement, appeared in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (EUP 2022).

Will May

Alexandra Harris on 15/01/2021

Will May

Associate Professor in English, University of Southampton

My research explores how writing practices can inform our understanding of place. In the Leverhulme-funded project StoryPlaces, I worked with creative writers and colleagues in Electronics and Computer Science on a location-based authoring tool, running writing projects in Crystal Palace, Southampton Docks, and the Bournemouth Natural Science Society. In my teaching, I encourage students to read and write poetry in specific spaces, from secondary classrooms (‘Creative Writing in Schools), to city farms (‘Animal Forms: Poetry and the Non-Human’), to abandoned military hospitals (‘Writing Place’).

As a poetry editor and critic, I am drawn to poets who attend to the particular squelch of the earth beneath them, from Stevie Smith, the poet of flat coastlands and rainy suburban parks, to F.T. Prince, the South-African born poet whose works take in urban graffiti in Rome, Keatsian walking country, and the vast expanses of the veldt.

Publications include Stevie Smith and Authorship (OUP, 2010), The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (Faber, 2015), and Reading F.T. Prince (LUP, 2017).

My new project explores the places and practices of mentoring in modern British poetry, from the university seminar room to the local park bench.

Fariha Shaikh

Alexandra Harris on 13/01/2021

Fariha Shaikh

Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Birmingham

I specialise in empire and literary studies in the nineteenth century, and the idea of ‘place’ is crucial to my monograph Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). In it, I examine the relationship between place and mobility: as an increasing number of people moved away from Britain to the colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, literature became one of the ways through which they sought to articulate a sense of place or home. Yet, the diaries, letters and novels that they wrote, and the periodicals they produced were not tethered to any one place, but instead circulated through the empire, gaining wide readerships not only in Britain, but in the colonies too. Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration seeks to understand the ways in which these different genres construct an affect of place and a sense of belonging, but also the ways in which place travels through these mobile texts. The interconnected questions of texts, mobility and place, of course, play out in a number of different ways across the nineteenth-century British empire, and I am also interested in the ways in which imperial environments are variously constructed in genres as diverse as autobiography and memoir, travel writing, and adventure fiction.

Isabel Galleymore

Alexandra Harris on 13/01/2021

Isabel Galleymore

Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Birmingham

My research focuses on contemporary literature and ecocriticism and the recent popularity in ‘place writing’ forms a crucial chapter in my monograph Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Here, I explore the recent phenomenon of the environmental writing course (a specialized form of the creative writing course) offered at UK and US universities, which, in many, if not all, cases, includes an element of place-based pedagogy. Indeed, it is now possible for students to undertake an MA dedicated to ‘Place Writing’ at several institutions including Manchester Metropolitan University. My research investigates the influences behind this pedagogy: the canon of environmental literature, which includes David Henry Thoreau’s Walden; the recent boom of British ‘new nature writing’ first articulated by Jason Cowley; and the history of place-based education that arose with the environmental movement in the 1960s. My investigation looks at how university courses today frequently aim to foster in their students’ writing a reverent approach to local place, and I compare this to contemporary ecocritical perspectives that often critique such an approach. Ursula Heise’s influential argument in Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2008) articulates the necessary challenge of engaging globally. Drawing on her theory of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ and Juliana Spahr’s poetics of communality, I suggest ways of developing current pedagogical emphasis on intimate connections with local environments by cultivating awareness of place in the context of global ecological relations.

Felicity James

Alexandra Harris on 16/12/2020

Felicity James

Associate Professor in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature, University of Leicester

fj21@leicester.ac.uk

Leicester profile

My journey into Romantic place began with Charles Lamb’s deliberate taunt to Wordsworth in a letter of 1801, responding both to a present of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads and an invitation to Cumberland:

“Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. – I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers can have done with dead nature.” (Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed, Edwin Marrs, 3 vols (Comell, 1975-8), I, 267.

This was my first introduction to the voice of Lamb, a sly, sharp, city Romanticism. It seemed at first directly opposed to my teenage version of the Wordsworthian sublime, whirled round with rocks and stones and trees. But Lamb’s ‘intense local attachments’ are actually deeply interconnected with Wordsworth’s response to place: a living, London reading of Lyrical Ballads. I spent the next few years of post-graduate study working out Lamb’s relationship to his contemporaries – and the fractious connections between the sociability of urban Romanticism, at home in the tavern and the periodical, and the solitary inspiration of the mountain poet. The two extremes of Romantic place have inspired my work since, and feed into my first book Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

I continue to draw on that work, as I edit the children’s writing of Charles and Mary Lamb, to be published as Volume 3 of the Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, under the general editorship of Gregory Dart. The Lambs’ lively writing for the Godwins’ ‘Juvenile Library’ brings the urban world of publishing for children together with their readings of eighteenth-century and Romantic writers. I currently hold a Leverhulme Fellowship to undertake this work, the first scholarly edition of their children’s writing for over one hundred years. I am co-chair of the Charles Lamb Society, which holds regular lectures on the Lambs, their circle, and Romantic London, open to all.

The Lambs prompted me to explore the creative conversations and networks of religious Dissent. What began as an interest in the Essex Street Chapel where the friendship of Charles Lamb and Coleridge was cemented, and the Monthly Magazine where their poetry was first published, expanded into a larger interest in the places, families and communities associated with rational Dissent. These stretch from the Academies like Warrington which nurtured Anna Laetitia Barbauld and William Gaskell, and the industrialist families such as the Strutts who helped the young Coleridge, to the intellectual and literary exchanges of the Midlands and Norwich. Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860 (cambridge.org), my co-edited essay collection, discusses some of these Unitarian networks; I’m also interested in tracing literary connections and forgotten works of these circles, as in my edition, with Tim Whelan, of the lost feminist novel Fatal Errors (1819).

I’m also always interested in joining in conversations about the place of Romantic reading and writing, such as the AHRC-funded networks Creative Communities 1750-1830, and Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900. I was part of the AHRC project Understanding Everyday Participation, working with an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore the long history of cultural participation in particular communities, and you can read my chapter on Peterborough, past and present, in our book Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance .

I look forward to continuing the conversations, national and international, urban and rural, through Arts of Place.

Michael Malay

Alexandra Harris on 18/11/2020

Michael Malay

Lecturer in English Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol.

Michael’s current project is about four creatures – eels, moths, freshwater mussels and crickets – that are disappearing from Britain, and about the people who love and care for them.

The project takes the view that animals are not only present in places, but co-creators of a place’s presence, and that, as these world-making beings disappear, the human imagination is altered as much as physical landscapes are.

Alongside this narrative of loss, however, the project is also about the hope and wonder these animals can inspire in us and about their capacity to flourish again in damaged or neglected places.

The book is provisionally entitled Late Light and a section from the ‘eel’ chapter can be read online at The Willow Herb Review.

Hattie Walters

Alexandra Harris on 17/10/2020

Hattie Walters

PhD Candidate, Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham

hxw368@student.bham.ac.uk

My work discusses interactions between the garden and literary and visual cultures in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the materialisation of lived and local histories through garden work.

From Gertrude Jekyll, Mary Watts, and Ford Madox Ford, to the Sitwells, Dora Carrington, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Vita Sackville-West, I am fascinated by how an individual’s gardening influences (and interferes) with their artistic practices—and how they engage with an artistically mediated understanding of rural countryside.

I look to unpick how gardens, broadly defined, can be exploited not just as an inseparable stimulus for a figure’s art but molded to provide a personal interrogation into history, frequently one localised and set on invigorating an ideal of the rural working class. The study of modern garden cultures enables the isolation and examination of the material interventions of artistic cultures into rural life, from the reclamation of historic houses, to the beautification of derelict cottages, and the cultivation of horticultural “quaintness”, or a pre-existing sense of “charm”.

I am particularly interested in tracking a personal kind of garden history: revelations amongst runner beans, for instance, or biographically endowed potato plants; the design of terracotta pots in a declaration of family heritage; formative readings in orchards; or queer country cottage retreats.