Category: Profiles

The site-specific character of writing and reading is central to my work in Romantic and Victorian literature, culture, and book history. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2004) analysed the burial places and commemorative topographies of poets – Burns, Hemans, Hood, Keats, the Rossettis, Shelley, Tennyson and Wordsworth – as resonant sites for critical reception and imaginative homage, via varied texts, images, and literary tourism. This interest in churchyards and cemeteries as complex sites and subjects which invite yet resist representation joins up with my fascination with material texts which directly address the reader and attempt to shape their experience. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (OUP, 2020), which reconstructs the largely forgotten 1820s’ craze for keeping albums and collecting album verses, reconsiders Romantic manuscript and print culture in relation to places and personalities. It reconstructs lost albums and visitors’ books associated with specific buildings and landscapes (the ‘Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the Jerningham family album at Cossey Hall, Norfolk) and reads album verses and inscriptions as site-specific and temporally located unique autographic texts which were appropriated, discredited, yet disseminated in commercial print culture.

My research focuses on early modern politics, taste, and empire. It seeks to reconstruct Anglo-Indigenous relations using texts, plantation archaeology, and museum collections, including portraits at the London National Portrait Gallery and South American featherwork at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. My book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores the entanglement between Native American lifeways and political culture in London, arguing that the civil identities of the governing elite became bound up in colonial intervention and the cultivation of American spaces. Related to this, I am interested in how American commodities and artefacts – tobacco leaves, beaver furs, shell beads – left their places of origin and were appropriated in new contexts in London. I am currently working on an article on how cavalier poets and artists imagined Madagascar in the 1630s; and another on early Stuart plantation landscapes and their connections to English estates and pleasure grounds. An ongoing element of my research is about heritage and how we confront the legacies of colonialism in country houses, plantation sites, and museum displays, including the place of contemporary art and poetry in ‘speaking back’ to historical material.

More on the TIDE Project

New worlds are never new. Places carry memory, and they are seen through layers of memories, both personal and communal. From Renaissance imaginings of Carthage, forever haunted by Virgil’s Dido, to the sixteenth century Portuguese-dominated port-city of Goa in western India, paying attention to place opens up new windows into the ways in which human beings negotiated their sense of wonder and strangeness, belonging and betweenness.

As the director of the European Research Council-funded ‘Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, 1550-1700’ (TIDE) project (www.tideproject.uk), I am particularly interested in the latter – about imagining home and exile in an age defined by human mobility, both voluntary and forced, and about the debates that raged around it, often articulated in terms of who belonged to a place and who did not.

‘Jus soli’, ‘right of soil,’ was literally a way of legally defining birthright and identity by tracing one’s roots to a place. But I am also interested in the close links between place and memory that lie deep in the ways of thinking in this period, in the ways a traveller was expected to take notes about a new place, for instance, translating geographical and cultural places into textual spaces. Working on Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–1600) and on travel writing in general (Cambridge History of Travel Writing, co-edited with Tim Youngs, 2019), have allowed me to explore some of the varied ways in which that has shaped the English imagination from the sixteenth century to the present day.

I have spent much of my career writing about heritage culture and landscape conservation. My first doctorate is in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature, and my thesis traced the literary history of heritage institutions, including the National Trust, in England from their imaginative foundations in the early nineteenth century to their rise as an industry in the twentieth century and beyond. My current book project, Moments of Vision: Lightscapes, European Nature Writing, and Modern Identity, is an environmental humanities study that places modern English writing about nature in a European context. The focus is on lightscapes and vision in relation to modern identity and the localisms through which that identity often emerged within a secularising culture. I explore the quality of luminosity in the work of Woolf, Proust, Valery, Auden, and von Arnim (among others), as well as in that of modern ‘nature writers’, especially in terms of how light shapes our perception of individual landscapes. I am also currently completing work on a history thesis which revolves around the relationship between royal, imperial, and aristocratic landscapes and the circulation of ideas about landscape in Britain and France, 1760-1818.

I co-organise the TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities) Environmental Humanities programme, a network of academics who write about the environment, conservation professionals, and environmentally-engaged artists. Our programme collaborates with a number of heritage and conservation organisations, including the National Trust, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, and Historic Royal Palaces.

Explore Allison’s Work

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/profiles/dr-allison-adler-kroll

https://oxford.academia.edu/AllisonAdlerKroll