Profiles – Page 2 – Arts of Place

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

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.

Heber Rodrigues

Jessica Fay on 24/11/2020

Heber Rogrigues

heber.rodriguess@outlook.com

My main research focuses on the field of sensory perception and consumer psychology, studying the impact of culture on consumers’ mental representation and sensory perception of different objects (food, wines, sensory descriptors and flowers). I also have an interest in scientific research on lifestyle and nosalgic experiences of consumption. Precisely, my current research agenda focuses both on consumer experience, mental representation and perception of wines and the mechanisms involved in the way we communicate the information we receive from our senses. Other scientific projects that I am currently developing relate to my interest in the experience of wine consumption during holidays, the use and the materialisation of the word ‘elegance’ as an anchoring point to enhance consumer experience and satisfaction when consuming food and wines. I hold a PhD in Food Sciences – Sensory Perception, from the Centre of Taste and Feeding Behaviour – Universite de Bourgogne, France. I am co-author of the book “Consumer Research Methods in Food Science” and currently, Researcher at the UK Centre for Excellence in Wine Education, Training and Research, Brighton, Researcher collaborator at The Secret Vine in Essex and member of the Program Experiment of the Aix-Marseille Universite, France.

Hannah Christopher

Alexandra Harris on 21/11/2020

Hannah Christopher

Alumna, BA English Literature, University of Birmingham

HFC009@alumni.bham.ac.uk

I am interested in the ways in which personal experiences in local places are microcosms of universal human experience. The early nineteenth-century writer Thomas Noble touches on this in the preface to his 1808 poem Blackheath, anticipating that readers will think his subject ‘entirely local’ and therefore not of interest to ‘the public in general’. Yet, he writes, ‘my subject is not local; it is as pervasive as Nature’. Less than three miles away from where Noble found his muse in the environs of Blackheath is an unnamed scrap of common ground which has always been known to me as The Place. The term ‘place’ will conjure up different environments in every mind, but in suburban London, my brother and I ascribed the term to this open wild field, unique in its position overlooking the city. It sits above the snaking maze of textured concrete, painted walls and brown brick. It satisfied my sense of what Constance Padwick, editor of the diaries of Victorian painter and missionary Lilias Trotter, describes as ‘space hunger’; a yearning and dreaming for the skyline beyond the ‘man-stifled town’. Landscapes have the power to fill us with an almost physical sense of awe, something well established in research about Wordsworth and his contemporaries, but which seems equally important in the recent boom in nature writing in the twenty-first century, amid an urban and digital environment.

I am also interested in how place informs literary creation, and how literary creation then informs place again. I planned a poetry guided walk around Winterbourne Gardens and was involved in the curation and running of the Canal and River Trust’s first floating exhibition entitled Journeys. The exhibition reframed the industrial story of the Birmingham canals, uncovering personal, hidden histories of canals as places of art, recreation, community and wellbeing.

I am currently working on a group of poems provisionally titled Reflections of Glory engaging with local place as a source of parable which points the created to the creator.

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.

Thomas Kaye

Alexandra Harris on 17/11/2020

Thomas Kaye

PhD Student (Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar), Department of English and Forest Edge, BIFoR.
txk006@student.bham.ac.uk

Forest Edge

My research delves into the woodlands and forests of contemporary fiction where these ancient biotic spaces radiate with warping pressure. I am especially interested in how modern authors reimagine mythic and folkloric roots, twisting them into contemporary tales that lead to the blending of the human and the more-than-human through contact with trees. I am developing a thesis that examines the affect of trees, how they metamorphose both the human and the text – I am exploring this symbiosis as an imaginative rewilding.

Currently I am researching our often imperceptible, yet ever present, reciprocal respiration with trees. The dual meaning of respire – to breathe and to recover – lends itself to a discussion of texts that confound vegetal and bodily processes all the while engaging in a recovery. To select texts that are themselves a form of renewal makes them analogous to the woodland space they engage with and create – for woods are self-renewing. I hypothesise that forests and woodlands respire in our art. They aid the recovery and retelling of tales that in return provide a respite for our rapidly depleted woodlands.

My research covers the writings of Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Daisy Johnson, and Sarah Hall. I also hope to engage with sculpture, particularly the work of David Nash.

Zara Castagna

Alexandra Harris on 21/10/2020

Zara Castagna

PhD student in English Literature

zxc816@student.bham.ac.uk

My research focuses on Dorothy Wordsworth and her circle, approximately from 1787 to 1830. I have wider interests in Romantic period writing and initially encountered Dorothy’s work through her particular way of describing landscapes and her use of the picturesque. Being also interested in life-writing, I now focus Dorothy’s letters, specifically on the way she uses the letter to draw people from different places together and maintain friendships across large distances. I want to explore how these primarily epistolary relationships influenced and shaped Dorothy’s perception of place and that, in turn, her other writings.

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.

Bethan Roberts

Alexandra Harris on 13/09/2020

Bethan Roberts

William Noble Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Liverpool

My first book: Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Place, Form and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century (Liverpool University Press, 2019) offers the first full-length study of Smith’s influential Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sense of literary tradition is inscribed in the subjects of her poems, and that the literary associations of the places, settings, flora and fauna of her sonnets – across the River Arun, the sea, plants and flowers – are a constitutive aspect of them. It is interested in and reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors. My second book is Nightingale for the Reaktion Press Animal series (forthcoming, 2021) and my current research is on Romantic ornithology; and on the literary and natural history of the River Mersey.

Jimmy Packham

Alexandra Harris on 13/09/2020

Jimmy Packham

Lecturer in North American Literature, University of Birmingham

My interests in landscape and environment flow in two (occasionally overlapping) directions: the literature of the sea and the blue humanities, on the one hand, and the gothic and the nonhuman, on the other. What unites these topics is how literature can speak to us on an ethical level – not how it can dictate certain morals to us, not how it might tell us how we can or how we should behave; but rather, how careful and considered engagement with a piece of writing, how listening to the voices and representational work within that piece of writing, provides the building blocks for understanding our own ethical relationship with others, and with the world we inhabit. By inflecting this process by the seascapes and environments, and nonhuman creatures (and monsters) of maritime and gothic fiction, we are challenged to engage with ideas, worlds, behaviours, forms of being that are at times wholly unfamiliar, alien to, hostile to, our usual terrestrial world and the modes of being and behaviour we are used to engaging in.

My recent research follows several trajectories with this literature: the cultural history of the deep sea, exploring how the deep and its ecosystems are often portrayed as being somehow “beyond” our limited human knowledge and asking what it means to cast a natural environment in these terms; the representation of human-animal relationships in recent gothic fiction about vegetarianism or meat production; and the role of the coast in gothic fiction from the eighteenth-century to the present, exploring the intersection of human culture and an environmental ecotone traditionally seen as “in-between”, neither sea nor land proper, neither here nor there.

Matthew Ward

Alexandra Harris on 13/09/2020

Matthew Ward

Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham

Matthew is interested in the art of place specifically from the perspective of soundscapes and listening to (primarily natural) environments. His background is in the history of emotions of the long eighteenth century and Romantic-period writing, and his fascination with our relation to, and feelings for, the natural world stems in part from the emergence during this time of what we might call an ecological way of thinking. Specifically, then, what we might say is a certain Romantic hope (perhaps most clearly articulated in the writing of the Wordsworths) that sympathy with nature leads also to greater understanding of ourselves and others.

Matthew’s next project will hopefully explore the sorts of thinking and feeling produced by listening to the sounds of the natural world, and how particular places (for instance riverbanks, seashores, forests, mountain-tops, open fields) might speak with distinctive resonance. He hopes that a consideration of listening in literature (and especially the response and attitude of Romantic and post-Romantic poets) to landscape, location, place, and space, will encourage us to be more attentive and attuned to the natural world. Listening in literature is also an invitation to become better listeners – both to literature and its sounds, rhymes and rhythms, its sonic effects and in our lives and how we listen to the environment and its ever-changing soundscape. During a time of ecological and environmental crisis, such possibilities lead to opportunities to better process how we listen to nature and what it is telling us about our fragile planet. Matthew is keen to explore how this project might have educational value as well – not only to inspire greater environmentalism but also to encourage children to spend more time outside as a way of helping them reflect on their place in the world, and how environments provide imaginative space as well.