Research projects

Based on recent research in Princeton, Clare Hutton is currently writing a long essay on ‘The Legacies and Letters of Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach’.  This builds on ‘Women and the Making of Ulysses’ and explores the correspondence which passed between two of Joyce’s female publishers, Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach from 1920 to 1961.  These letters tell a rich and detailed story of female friendship, and reflect an unusual perspective on Joyce’s life.  In close reading this record, the aim is to establish the basis for a different kind of biography, one which is feminist and nuanced, and which appraises the significance of women working behind the scenes. 

Sarah Parker has recently published a new book entitled Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922: A Line of Her Own. The book transforms current understandings of twentieth-century poetry by attending to the work of women poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan. While mainly associated with the late nineteenth century, Sarah’s work shows that these poets were highly active in the early twentieth century and, far from being uninterested in modernity, used their poetry to address contemporary concerns, including suffrage, sexuality, motherhood, and the First World War.

Based on her doctoral research, Emily Bell is currently developing a paper on affective and emotional networks evidenced in James Joyce’s library. Using his correspondence, Emily’s work remodels Joyce’s reading practice by looking at the emotional ties that connected Joyce to his reading materials and to his readers. This research helps us understand how reading tasks were delegated and distributed among family, friends and helpers both near and far.

Throughout our lives other people help us give birth, look after our children, clean our workplaces or houses, and attend to us when we are ill, ageing, and dying. Jennifer Cooke has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to examine how contemporary literature gives voice and narrative agency to the experiences of undervalued workers to whom we outsource care and domestic labour.

The research focuses upon the representation of five figures who can be hired to help, from the beginnings of life until its end: the surrogate, nanny, cleaner, nurse, and the carer. Care is a pressing societal concern with transnational implications, since many care roles are undertaken by migrant workers. This project offers timely arguments for revaluing outsourced care and domestic labour and for contemporary literature’s powerful attention to those workers upon whom we rely. It builds upon earlier work of Jennifer’s, published in her co-edited collection, Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies. The result will be her third monograph.

Joan Fitzpatrick is finalizing her seventh monograph, this one for Routledge, on hospitality and hostility in Shakespeare's plays. This book provides critical analysis of the most important moments featuring hospitality or a lack of it (hostility) shown to strangers of various kinds in Shakespeare’s plays, situating those moments historically in order to fully explore Shakespeare's engagement with early modern views of what it meant to welcome or reject those who seek hospitality. It shows that in the plays we witness a thinking-through of the definitions of 'self' (and self-interest) and 'other' that we use to make sense of the world, and an exploration of the social, economic, and political conditions under which such distinctions were problematized.

Mary Brewer is currently working on a monograph, War, Religion, and American Cultural Production, which analyses how religion is framed in the context of war in films about American conflicts in World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. Mary explores films produced by major Hollywood studios that have attained blockbuster status, such as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), as well as indie films, such as Harold Cronk's Unbroken: Path to Redemption (2018).  She considers how the representation of war in American culture raises fundamental questions of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, and justice and injustice, and as such, how ethics and morality are central to plot and audience reception. Mary's approach is interdisciplinary, drawing upon primary and secondary material from war studies, theology, literary and film studies.  

Nick Freeman is researching the first English production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which took place in London in May 1905. Salome could not be performed publicly in Britain because of a longstanding ban on the presentation of Biblical characters in secular drama, but a legal loophole meant this did not apply to private theatre societies. One of these, led by the remarkable actor, writer, musician, and occultist, Florence Farr, decided to stage Wilde’s play despite its provocative content and the criminal reputation of its author. A series of remarkable events ensued. British theatre would never be quite the same again.

Building on previous work on the history of the modern poetry draft, The Archaeology of the Poem is a new project by Wim Van Mierlo. This major study is a comparative investigation of the creative practices of five major poets: William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, and Ted Hughes. Uncovering the creative process from the literary archive, this project undertakes a detailed investigation of what these poets’ interactions with the material page, and their use paper and ink, can tell us about creative stimuli, moments of inspiration, as well as points of hesitation and difficulty that take the composition of a poem into unforeseen directions.

While such an investigation can reveal much about the imaginary and cognitive origins of poetry, creating new insights into what creativity is, the purpose of the investigation is to demonstrate first and foremost how the creative process is both a personal and cultural phenomenon. In highlighting the commonalities in the writing process of these five poets, the project will uncover the existence of a rich and fascinating ‘manuscript culture’ in the modern period. At the same time, the project will generate new, robust methodologies for the analysis of palaeographical and codicological evidence in modern manuscripts. Such methodologies do not yet exist for the period after 1700 the way they do for manuscripts from earlier periods.