Registration open: Cultures of Skin, 7th-8th July

Registration is now open for Cultures of Skin: skin in literature and culture, past, present, future, on 7^th and 8 July 2023 at the University of Surrey, UK.

This conference brings together scholars working on literary and cultural representations of skin, across historical periods and transnational contexts, to create new dialogues on the cultural meanings of skin from the past through to the present day, and consider the current and future state of the field(s) of skin studies.

We have 28 international speakers across the 2 days and are very excited about the programme speaking to a wide range of skin studies themes.

The conference is running fully hybrid and there are attendance options for both in-person and virtual attendance. Please see the conference website for full information, and contact culturalskinstudies@gmail.com with any queries.

New publication: Mobilities, Literature, Culture

Mobilities, Literature, Culture is published today with Palgrave Macmillan. Edited with Marian Aguiar and Lynne Pearce, my co-editors of the Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, the edited collection is the 5^th volume in the series.

The collection came out of a conference of the same name held at Lancaster University in April 2017, which proved to be a really inspiring event in establishing the relationship between mobilities studies and literary and cultural studies, and we’re delighted that the book reflects an exciting range of topics and methodological approaches. The book covers themes of mobility and nation, embodied subjectivities, the geopolitics of migration, and mobility futures. We have also written a substantial introduction with an expansive bibliography which we hope will be a useful resource for scholars, especially those who are new to the field. The book can be purchased as an e-book or hardback on the Palgrave website.

We are always happy to receive expressions of interest and proposals for the series, which thus far has publications on the hotel in modern literature, migration and the body, automobiles in French Indochina, and memory and the life course in 20^th-century literature, with more works on topics including aeromobilities and roadside spaces on the way. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss a potential proposal!

 

 

 

CFP: Centennial Reflections on Women’s Suffrage and the Arts, 29-30 June 2018

CENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND THE ARTS

Local : National : Transnational

 An international, multi-disciplinary public conference

University of Surrey, UK, 29–30 June 2018

Keynote Speakers:

• Irene Cockroft, author of Women in the Arts & Crafts and Suffrage Movements at the Dawn of the 20th Century
• Elizabeth Crawford, author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland

Conference website: www.suffragecentennial.wordpress.com

The 2018 centenary of the Representation of the People Act (6 February 1918), which granted the vote to many women in the UK, yields an ideal opportunity for sustained critical reflection on women’s suffrage. This conference seeks to explore the artistic activities nurtured within the movement, their range and legacy, as well as the relationships between politics and art. In striving for an inclusive, transnational reach, it will at the same time seek to move beyond traditional emphases on white middle-class feminism and explore the intersections between the regional, national, and global contexts for women’s suffrage with specific respect to the arts.

While proposals addressing any aspects of women’s suffrage will be welcomed, this conference will focus upon three strands:

1. Women’s suffrage in/and the arts
2. Women’s suffrage in Surrey and the surrounds
3. Transnational networks and flows of texts in relation to women’s suffrage

20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of these strands, including but not limited to:

• Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s writing on suffrage;
• Political reflections on the arts and the cultural sphere, e.g. in music;
• Transnational networks and mobilities of political texts and ideas, incorporating suffrage movements in other countries;
• Politically active individuals with strong links to Surrey (particularly in relation to the arts) e.g. Mary Watts, Dame Ethel Smyth, Gertrude Jekyll, Marion Wallace Dunlop;
• Networks such as Ferguson’s Gang, Surrey Hills Group, Surrey Pilgrimage Group, and women who organised suffrage marches;
• Sociological theories of women’s suffrage;
• Contributions of women of colour to suffrage movements in Britain and globally;
• Art (both historical and contemporary) inspired by women’s suffrage.

Proposals for panels of 3–4 papers (1.5–2 hours) are also warmly welcomed, as are proposals for one-hour roundtables of 3–5 participants. We encourage proposals from postgraduate students and independent scholars in addition to institutionally-affiliated established academics.

Planned activities include a panel discussion featuring artists who have been active in performing and creating works based on women’s suffrage and some of its key figures; a recital of the music of Dame Ethel Smyth; and a visit to the nearby Watts Gallery. We envisage that an edited publication will be developed from papers presented at the conference.

Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be e-mailed by 26 January 2018 to suffragecentennial@surrey.ac.uk. Decisions will be communicated to speakers by 23 February 2018. A limited number of student bursaries may be offered to offset costs of attendance.

Conference Committee: Christopher Wiley, Charlotte Mathieson, Lucy Ella Rose (co-chairs)

Enquiries: suffragecentennial@surrey.ac.uk

The conference is supported by the University of Surrey and Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland

Mobilities, Literature, Culture Conference @ Lancaster University 21-22nd April #MLCConf17

After months of preparation, last week the Mobilities, Literature, Culture Conference took place at Lancaster University. The conference, organised by myself, Marian Aguiar, Lynne Pearce and Bruce Bennett, launched the new Palgrave series Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.

Like the series, the conference aimed to provide a forum for scholars working at the intersection of literary and cultural studies and mobilities theories – scholars drawing upon cultural geography and/or sociology to gain new insights into literary and cultural texts, and those making use of literary and cultural texts in theorizing of space and movement. We invited papers discussing a broad range of transport modes, in a variety of textual forms, across historical periods and geographical spaces, and we were not disappointed by the wonderful variety of work presented. Across the two days we had papers from the Roman era to the present day, on different modes of movement across land and sea – railways, cycling, walking, running, boat; a variety of textual forms and genres, from Chinese landscape painting, Hollywood cinema, Early Modern drama, oral narratives, locative sound art, crime fiction, and nineteenth-century novels; spaces of mobility such as the American roadside and hotels; and travelling things, from cases of whisky to bodily organs. We were also delighted by the international response to the CFP and welcomed scholars from South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, USA, Poland, Lebanon, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Spain.

The panel sessions were framed by two fantastic plenary papers. Kat Jungnickel (Goldsmiths, London) began proceedings with her paper ‘Secret Cycling Selves: How Victorian women negotiated multiple mobile identities through patented cycle wear’, a fascinating exploration of how women came up with innovative solutions to the problem of cycling in unsuitable skirts by creating adaptable clothing – wonderfully demonstrated by Kat, who wore a replica 1890s skirt that had been recreated by her and a small research team from Victorian patents of the original inventions. On the second day, Marian Aguiar (Carnegie Mellon) spoke about ‘Drifting:  Agency, Mobility, and the Image of the Maritime Migrant’. Marian’s timely work looks at “drifting” as a form of sea-mobility that allows us to rethink key issues of the mobilities paradigm; from the identity of the maritime subject, the vectors of geographical movement when they are released from mapped routes, and the intersections of politics, legality, environment, and cultural representation through which migrant subject experiences of drifting are enacted and perceived.

The conference concluded with the screening of a new film by director Andrew Kotting, who has undertaken mobile projects with Iain Sinclair. Their latest, Edith Walks, traces a 108-mile pilgrimage from Waltham Abbey in Essex to St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex, in memory of Edith Swan Neck, wife of King Harold, reconnecting the lovers after 950 years. The film raised questions around the role of mobility in memory and recreation, temporality and the landscape as a source of memory, and the relationship between past and present in mobile practices.

The conference team also spoke on a roundtable on future directions in mobility studies, with invited participants Peter Merriman (Aberystwyth), Ruth Livesey (Royal Holloway, London), and Nick Dunn (LICA, Lancaster). The roundtable discussion reiterated what the conference as a whole encapsulated: that mobility studies is at an exciting moment, now well-established as a dynamic point of intersection between the humanities and social sciences, and with many new directions to explore in future work.

The series editors – myself, Marian and Lynne – finished the conference by talking with prospective authors about projects for the series. If you would like to know more or are interested in submitting a proposal, the poster is below and you can either contact our Palgrave editor Allie Bochicchio or get in touch with me or the other editors directly to discuss an idea.

The conference also had a very lively twitter feed #MLCConf17 – thank you to everyone who captured this all! – and I have created a Storify of tweets here.

Thank you to everyone who presented, participated, and followed along online, and to the Lancaster Centre for Mobilities Research which provided a fantastic venue for the conference.

Interview about Sea Narratives on New Books in Critical Theory

I was recently interviewed by Dave O’Brien of Goldsmiths University about Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present for New Books in Critical Theory. The podcast is available here and can be downloaded or streamed.

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest in both the subject and the approach the book uses. The book travels across the globe as well as across the centuries since 1600, taking in French accounts of the Atlantic crossing; prisoners of war; newspaper articles; Soviet technology and propaganda; Irishness and Ireland’s sense of itself; Du Maurier’s understanding of the coast; A S Byatt’s work; the idea of the Anthropocene; and “coastal exceptionalism.” Each essay is fascinating in its own right, but the collection builds to reorientate the study of the sea for historians and literary scholars, as well as any academic interested in how we narrate and culturally produce the sea.

Many thanks to Dave for the opportunity to speak about the book.

Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1940

This one has been a bit quiet for a while as I’ve been busy with a couple of other publications since, but my first edited collection Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1940 which I co-edited with Dr Gemma Goodman (Warwick), is now available in paperback for £34 from Routledge.

The collection was generously reviewed earlier this year by Josephine McDonagh in Victorian Studies 58.2 (pp. 383-385).

At a glance, the contents are as follows:

Introduction: Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920, Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson

1. ‘Women in the Field’, Roger Ebbatson
2. ‘Between two civilizations”: George Sturt’s constructions of loss and change in village life’, Barry Sloan
3. ‘At Work and at Play: Charles Lee’s Cynthia in the West’, Gemma Goodman
4. ‘“Going out, Going Alone”: Modern Subjectivities in Rural Scotland, 1900-1921’, Samantha Walton
5. ‘“Drowned Lands”: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and the Masculation of the English Fens’, Lynsey McCulloch
6. ‘“Wandering like a wild thing”: Rurality, Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss’, Charlotte Mathieson
7. ‘“I never liked long walks”: Gender, Nature, and Jane Eyre’s Rural Wandering’, Katherine F. Montgomery
8. ‘Gertrude Jekyll: Cultivating the Gendered Space of the Victorian Garden for Professional Success’. Exploring the work of Gertude Jekyll (1843-1932)’ Christen Ericsson-Penfold
9. ‘From England to Eden; Gardens, Gender and Knowledge in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out’, Karina Jakubowicz
10. ‘The Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm’, Eliza S. K. Leong

Now published – Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present

I am delighted to say that Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present has now been published with Palgrave Macmillan and can be purchased from the Palgrave website for £66.99 or as an ebook for £49.99; chapters can also be purchased individually. My thanks go to the contributors for their hard work on the fascinating chapters; it really was a pleasure to work on this book from start to finish.

I have written more here about the premise and contents of the book.

New book series – Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture with Palgrave Macmillan

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new book series Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture with Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Marian Aguiar, Lynne Pearce and myself. Please feel free to get in touch directly if you would like to discuss potential submissions.

About the series:

This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds – ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds – i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.

 

Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present

This week I have been busy finishing my edited collection Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present which will be published in early May. Brief details are now up on the publisher’s website at the link above but I wanted to provide some more information about the individual chapters that make the collection.

Sea Narratives began with the symposium of the same name in January 2014. The book collection started with the impetus to explore the relationship between the sea and culture, from the early modern period to the present, through the lens of the ‘sea narrative’. While narratives of various kinds are oft-used in cultural studies of the sea I felt that, with the exception of a handful of genre-specific studies, no one has really focused on the ‘sea narrative’ as a concept, as it crosses through a diverse array of genres – letters, diaries, films, newspapers, novels, poems, plays, scientific and political documents, material artefacts and travel writing – and as it travels through cultures, across historical periods. What is a sea narrative? In what ways does it make sense to speak of the ‘sea narrative’ as a form? What draws together this diverse corpus of material and makes it distinctive?

This collection, then, seeks to explore how might we understand the relationship between narrative and the sea. The essays here each foreground, in various ways, the relationship between sea and narrative form as central to, rather than the backdrop of, their enquiries. In doing so, they show not only how cultures have come to represent the sea, but also how narratives find their very forms shaped, challenged, reinvented, in the process.

My introduction to the book charts out some of these threads, situating the work in relation to recent cultural studies of the sea, as well as broader currents of socio-geographies of the sea that particularly inform the transnational theorising of the volume. In this I seek to theorise the ‘sea narrative’ as a form, looking especially at the idea of narrative as a process in these works. The collection then moves onto the nine chapters that each take a different historical period and cultural context to elucidate further on these themes, as outlined in the authors’ abstracts:

A Need to Narrate? Early Modern French Accounts of Atlantic Crossings. Michael Harrigan (University of Bath)

Harrigan offers a new reading of processes of narrative transmission within the early modern Atlantic basin in a trajectory moving from the social, or human interactions, to the supra-human, or perceptions of interactions with environment, the ocean, and beyond. Through the analysis of four rarely-studied seventeenth-century narratives in French (François Pyrard, Guillaume Coppier, Antoine Biet, Jean Mongin), this chapter explores the generation of narrative through accelerated and collective human displacements and cultural disruptions, the narrative as a vector of new and familiar cultural capital and the text as repository for circulating narratives and popular rites, and assesses the role of human agency within the anthropocentric ocean narrative.

‘A sea of stories’: Maritime imagery and imagination in Napoleonic narratives of war captivity. Elodie Duché (York St John University)

Whilst a growing interest in prisoners of war has shifted the lens of investigation towards a cultural appreciation of their ‘low literature’, little attention has been given to the use of landscapes, particularly mnemonic and imaginary seascapes, in voicing forced displacement in times of war. In this chapter, Duché addresses this issue by exploring, in unison, how French and British captives of the Napoleonic Wars mobilised and circulated sea-inspired tropes not only to express their situation in reference to the ‘sea voyage’ genre, but also to retrieve a lost everyday and to converse with the societies surrounding their seclusion. Drawing on diaries and objects produced by detainees, this chapter re-evaluates the role of the sea as a site of narration and memorialisation of coerced mobility.

‘Through Dustless Tracks’ for African Rights: Narrative Currents and Political Imaginaries of Solomon Plaatje’s 1914 Sea Voyage. Janet Remmington (University of York)

Remmington provides a rich analysis of black South African journalist Solomon Plaatje’s under-studied sea narrative written en route to imperial London as part of the African National Congress’ 1914 deputation to protest against the Natives’ Land Act. The chapter, drawing in part on Gilroyan and Foucauldian conceptualisations, examines Plaatje’s figuring of the open sea-scape, the integrated ship, and an idealised cosmopolitan destination as symbolic of freedoms across colour lines against the backdrop of South Africa’s increasingly racially constrained socio-political landscape. It explores Plaatje’s navigation through the darker historical and metaphorical territory of the ocean – slavery, colonial conquest, shipwrecks – and his negotiation of maritime domains claimed by white mastery – management of sea sickness, time, travel. Published in South African newspapers, the narrative situates Plaatje’s maritime journey as part of a larger mission for African rights at home and within the imaginary of a ‘world empire’.

‘From Icy Backwater to Nuclear Waste Ground’: The Russian Arctic Ocean in the Twentieth Century. Eva-Maria Stolberg (University of Duisburg-Essen)

This chapter provides a ‘technological narrative’ of Russian exploration of the Arctic Ocean, arguing that in contrast to previous centuries when sailing ships struggled with the masses of ice, technology of the twentieth century offered another imagery of the Arctic Ocean to emerge, associated with the breakthroughs by crews of icebreakers and Arctic pilots. This chapter falls into two parts: the first tells of the advance of the Arctic frontier by technology under Stalin (1930s-1950s), and the second enlightens a new epoch after World War II, the Atomic age in the Arctic Ocean. The chapter shows how Soviet propaganda turned the former icy backwater into a site at the forefront of Soviet technological modernization.

Shores of history, islands of Ireland: Chronotopes of the sea in the contemporary Irish novel. Roberta Gefter Wondrich (University of Trieste)

The article investigates the most significant patterns than can be traced in Irish contemporary  fiction’s interest in the sea and its related maritime topographies,  and argues how the most resonant associations of the sea imagery lie in the vexed relation between the historical past and communal and personal identity in the modern nation. Using the critical framework of the ‘chronotopes of the sea’ (‘at once geographies and topoi’, Cohen) and most notably the seaside/shoreline and the ship, in its analysis of novels by John Banville, Colm Toibin, Neil Jordan, Bernard Mac Laverty and Joseph O’Connor the chapter focuses on the association between memory, creativity and trauma, the sense of the past and the search for re/generation, and the trope of insularity as always referring to the identitarian tensions of Ireland.

Women at Sea: Locating and Escaping Gender on the Cornish Coast in The Loving Spirit and Frenchman’s Creek. Gemma Goodman (University of Warwick)

Goodman examines two of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornish novels – The Loving Spirit and Frenchman’s Creek.  The marketization of ‘du Maurier’s Cornwall’ by the tourist industry feeds both a version of Cornwall as romantic and picturesque and the pigeon-holing of du Maurier’s novels as over-simplistically romantic. The chapter problematizes constructions of the Cornish coast and of gender in the novels through exploring the experiences of the novels’ female protagonists. Janet Coombe and Dona St Columb look to escape social constructions of gender and the sea functions as a space of possibility for such an escape. Yet freedom is always ultimately denied. The Cornish coastal site can be understood as both suggesting and denying freedom from gender within the context of its ambiguous relationship to England.

Travelling across Worlds and Texts in A. S. Byatt’s Sea Narratives. Barbara Franchi (University of Kent)

The sea is an ocean of intertextual relations in A. S. Byatt’s fiction: in her neo-Victorian diptych Angels and Insects and the postmodern novel The Biographer’s Tale, Victorian maritime travel is juxtaposed to the seas of literature and creative relations across worlds and texts. This chapter examines how, through the deployment of intertextual strategies, Byatt’s sea narratives juxtapose the imperial seas of the north to the postcolonial crossings of civilizations in the Mediterranean and the South of the Atlantic. Franchi argues that the colonial seas are rewritten into a postcolonial and postmodern sea of words, through the recurrence of the myth of Ulysses and the powerfully transformative image of the maelstrom.

Unveiling the anthropo(s)cene: Burning seas, cinema of mourning and the globalisation of apocalypse. Sayandeb Chowdhury (Ambedkar University, Delhi)

Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen’s 1995 film Yugant offers a surprisingly prescient reading of what is now understood as signs of the arrival of Anthropocene. One of the earliest films from the Global South to have invoked the marauding ecological effects of globalization, Yugant resists easy categorization as feminist, national or leftist cinema. Primarily a sea-narrative in complex, understated ways, the film is about an urbane and estranged couple despondently attempting and failing reconciliation while on vacation on an Indian east-coach beach. The film reads their climactic and catastrophic dénouement as symptomatic of the violence against the planet and the sea as both a contrarian participant and spectacular casualty of it. Interrogating the film from the two-decade distance, the paper also foregrounds how the film manages to raise a range of questions that humanities can bring to the climate-change debate.

The Tolerant Coast. Isaac Land (Indiana State University)

Land uses readings of Lawrence Durrell, Amos Oz, and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff to introduce the concept of coastal exceptionalism.  The tolerant coast may be a utopian space, a permissive arena for expatriate Europeans, a zone of nostalgia, or a centre of synergy.  The chapter examines the examples of the Levant and the West Coast of the United States in some detail. The belief that there is a specific local quality that makes port towns uniquely tolerant places offers an interesting counterpoint to recent debates about the universal values of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and superdiversity.  Land concludes with a discussion of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley as a coastal expression of Saskia Sassen’s neoliberal global city, both hosting innovative firms and marketing itself as stylish and transgressive.

Sea Narratives will be available in ebook and hardback from 11 May 2016.

New publication: “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012”

Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited by Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, has just been published by Bloomsbury’s Arden Shakespeare series. The collection takes a range of perspectives on Shakespearean performance in 2012, emerging from the Year of Shakespeare project on the World Shakespeare Festival. I am pleased to have contributed a co-written essay, with Dr Peter Kirwan (Uni. of Nottingham) on “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012”, which parallels the Shakespeare Festival and the Dickens bicentenary to explore the cultural politics of locating authors within national literary landscapes, and how this plays out within an international cultural context.