Rona Cran

Rona Cran

Rona Cran

Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of North America, University of Birmingham

My current book-in-progress, Everyday Rebellion: Poetry and Resistance in New York, 1960-1995, is a study of poetry and resistance from the counterculture to the AIDS crisis. The study of New York poets involves an intellectual and affective closeness with the spaces and places of the city: much of their work is framed or shaped by what Jane Jacobs called (‘the heart-of-the-day ballet’, the immediate and localised intensities of New York. And yet, as Megan Bradbury writes, ‘the city is not a work of art. It is not an object. It is not something to be admired from a distance – it is a process’. Everyday Rebellion explores this process, arguing that socially-situated poetry offers crucial sites of resistance. It asks what we can learn from a poetics of loitering, of being on the street, of making contact with people in contingent places rather than within institutions; it examines the ways in which New York poets negotiate conflicting perceptions or experiences within the city; it considers the significance of working within a definable urban community, such as the New York School or the Black Arts Movement, or without one; it ponders the changing nature of the city streets for women poets, queer poets, and poets of colour, thinking about what it means to move or not move around the city; it investigates the erasure of queer connections and the work that city poetry does to combat this, thinking about the importance of alternative mapping to queer work; and considers the ways in which the poetry accounts for, or fails to account for, the environment out of which it emerges, that ‘Byzantine City’, to borrow from Jed Perl, that ‘place of exchanges, of cross-fertilizations’.

Samantha Matthews

Samantha Matthews

Samantha Matthews

Senior Lecturer in English, University of Bristol

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.

Will Bateman

Will Bateman

William Bateman

PhD Candidate, Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham

Sitting in the gardens of San Gaudenzio, above Lake Garda, D. H Lawrence reflected of the spirit of place, ‘Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens and intensifies, like experience’. In the perplexity of this reflection, Lawrence captures the curious contradictions which permeate his intense depictions of places and their populations. It is in this context that my research attends to the significance of place for both literary impressionism and modernism.

My current project explores Lawrence’s impressionistic responses to landscape and place in his writings on travel. Reading Lawrence’s travel sketches from the perspective of literary impressionism, it seeks to understand how a writer might codify and express the ambiguous and subjective nature of place. Exploring relevant ideas of otherness and alterity, it goes on to explore how we can read the indecipherability of place through the compositional history of texts. Finally, through an examination of Lawrence’s writings on Etruscan archaeology, it explores the significance of Ambivalence as a narrative strategy for ‘working-out’ the stratified layers of place.

Accordingly, my research engages actively with ideas of home, alterity, self-exile, and landscape. In addition, I am interested in how the narrativization and fictionalisation of ‘place’ and ‘emplacement’ contributes to resurgences in popular nationalistic feeling.

A glimpse of the Brenner Pass

The Brenner Pass represented a significant point of transition for D. H. Lawrence – both geographically and culturally. The ancient imperial road, the Via Imperii, once crossed the border between Austria and Italy at the Brenner, and for Lawrence the mountain pass marked the divide between industrialised northern Europe and the sensuous south. As part of my current research, I am reflecting on the significance of border crossing and mobility in the landscapes of Lawrence’s travel writing. Lawrence’s journey across the Alps to Italy, described in Twilight in Italy (1916), juxtaposes strange ‘atmospheres’ with moments of startling cognition – a contrast which highlights his intense interest in the literary investigation of perception and expression. Making comparisons with the ontology of literary impressionism, and in particular the writings of Ford Madox Ford, my research explores how Lawrence combined evocative depictions of place with metaphors of mobility, estranging landscapes, and invoking otherness in order to reproduce and comprehend his own bewildered impression of modernity.  

Christopher Donaldson

Christopher Donaldson

Christopher Donaldson

Lecturer in Cultural History, University of Lancaster

 

Modern landscape history is my main area of research.  My interest in this subject is threefold.  I am particularly interested in investigating how historical perceptions of places can help us recontextualise the administrative realities that condition our experiences of those places in the present. 

I am, moreover, interested in how geographically informed research in the environmental humanities can create new knowledge for the environmental sciences. 

Finally, I am interested in how geographical methodologies can create new perspectives and possibilities for humanities scholarship, especially in disciplines that are organised in terms of linguistic and temporal divisions. 

These interests are reflected in my current research projects.  The first of these focuses on the history of the Lake District’s designation as a National Park between the eighteenth century and the twentieth century.  The second project builds on my previous work in the digital humanities and involves the use of computational methodologies to develop a historical knowledgebase about past environmental conditions in globally significant upland regions. 

Both projects build on my recent publications, as well as my work as Research Coordinator at The Ruskin – Library, Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University.

Jon Stevens

Jon Stevens

MA by Research, English University of Birmingham

In the late 1960s, I moved to Liverpool to study architecture. I became acutely aware of the disconnect between the modernist dream of high-rise public housing (which many architects espoused) and the reality of the communities being destroyed to realise the dream, while their former residents were dispersed into desolate ‘overspill’ estates. Later, in Hackney, I became involved in community action, fighting to prevent an area of predominately working-class housing from being bulldozed for such redevelopment. These early experiences shaped my professional career over the next forty years – working, initially, on community-led approaches to the renewal of older areas of housing and, later, on various collaborative ways of creating housing and communities. Underpinning this was my interest in how people shape and are shaped by places.

More recently, I have turned to thinking about how places acquire different meanings and values over time. My just completed Masters by Research project examines how the historic city of Bruges was reimagined and reinvented during the nineteenth century by a succession of British poets, travel writers, artists and scholars and how their ideas permeated later Symbolist conceptions of Bruges. 

I am about to start another piece of research entitled ‘Bruges and the Meaning of Place’, in which I plan to delve deeper into Romantic notions of Bruges, as expressed in poems by Robert Southey and William Wordsworth and as shown in a series of suggestive sketches by JMW Turner, and I want to consider the impact that Bruges had on the thinking and practice of the leading advocate of the Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Pugin. It was Pugin’s ‘principles’ that guided the comprehensive transformation of the centre of Bruges that we see today.  I plan to locate my research within the interdisciplinary field of place studies, examining how Bruges became a nexus of ideas about the meaning of place in the nineteenth century.  

Lauren Working

Lauren Working

Lauren Working

Postdoctoral Researcher, TIDE, English Faculty, University of Oxford

lauren.working@ell.ox.ac.uk

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

Nandini Das

Nandini Das

Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, Oxford University

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.

Allison Adler Kroll

Allison Adler Kroll

Allison Adler Kroll

TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), Environmental Humanities Group, University of Oxford

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

Martin Stott

Martin Stott

Martin Stott

Sustainability campaigner, photographer, local champion, Oxford

I have worked on sustainable development and regeneration issues in my career in local government, having graduated from Oxford in geography and LSE in town and country planning. I am now a writer and photographer documenting the granular and quotidian characteristics of small spaces and the people who live in them – particularly in east Oxford, where I have lived for the past 40 years. My book The Cowley Road Cookbook: culinary tales and recipes from Oxford’s most eclectic street (Signal Books, 2015) documents the social and cultural history of one street through food, from the twelfth century to the present day. I blog as ‘Lord Muck’ in a fairly light-hearted manner on gardening, growing, cooking, composting and other aspects of our interaction with the natural world.

I have explored William Morris’s experience of, response to, and continuing impact on Iceland in ‘What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire: Morris and Iceland’ in The Routledge Companion to William Morris (ed. Florence Boos; Routledge, 2021).

I have been working since mid-2018 on a project to record every household on the street I have lived on for the past 33 years, in the Divinity Road Photo Project.  The street is very long, very diverse and very transient, and has been identified as the street with the widest range of household incomes in England. The COVID-19 pandemic has reframed and refocussed the project in a context where our understanding of neighbourhoods has become ever more important.

“Divinity Road has been identified as the street with the widest range of household incomes in England”

Explore Martin’s Work

www.martin-stott.com

Portrait of man at bay window
Martin Stott, Mallard Haye with his Arum Lilies, from The Divinity Road Photo Project, 2018

The Divinity Road Photo Project

The Routledge Companion to William Morris

Cookbook cover

The Cowley Road Cookbook: culinary tales and recipes from Oxford’s most eclectic street (Signal Books, 2015)

Andrew Hodgson

Andrew Hodgson

Andrew Hodgson

Lecturer in Romanticism at the University of Birmingham

My research focuses on poets and poetry, largely from the Romantic period onwards. I have written a book, Lyric Individualism (Palgrave, 2020), about four lyric poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – each of whom finds subtle and affecting ways of conveying a sense of place and the significance of home in their writing. My next project is a new edition of the correspondence of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s letters breathe an imaginative apprehension of the natural spirit and cultural inheritance of the places across Europe from which they were written.