Research
Modern and Contemporary Research Group
Relevant research and research activities by Modern and Contemporary Research Group members for this year includes:
Anne-Marie Beller will be presenting a paper at the ‘Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics’ conference in Amsterdam (June 2012). The paper is titled ‘Re-imagining Dickens: The Nature of Evidence in Drood and Mr. Dick’. She will also be speaking about M. E. Braddon’s novel The Outcasts at the annual conference of RSVP (The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals) in Austin, Texas (September 2012). Anne-Marie is also co-editing a special issue of the journal Women’s Writing with Tara McDonald (University of Amsterdam) on lesser-known female sensation novelists. She has chapters forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (CUP) and New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rodopi).
Carol Bolton is working as an editor on the Collected Letters of Robert Southey, an eight-volume, electronic, critical edition of Southey's correspondence. This is a major collaborative project, funded by the AHRC and the British Academy, with East-Midlands based scholars: Professor Lynda Pratt and Professor Bill Speck (University of Nottingham), Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University) and Dr Ian Packer (University of Lincoln). She also has two essays forthcoming in The Continuum Romanticism Handbook and the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Romanticism. She is presenting a paper, entitled 'Through Spanish eyes: Southey's social commentary in Letters from England (1807)' at the 'English and Welsh Diaspora' conference at Loughborough University, 13-16 April 2011.
Jennifer Cooke has an article forthcoming Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies entitled ‘Dorothy Richardson, Queer Theorist’. She is currently working on a monograph, Experimentalism, Intimacy, Affect, and editing Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorising Contemporary Literature and a special issue of Textual Practice entitled Challenging Intimacies: Legacies of Psychoanalysis. In the coming academic year, she’ll be giving papers at the ‘Poetry and Revolution’ conference (Birkbeck); the ‘Thinking Feeling’ conference (Sussex University); and the London Modernism Seminar. She has a book of poetry forthcoming entitled *not suitable for domestic sublimation from Contraband Press, and is one of the artists involved in the project ‘Queer, The Space’ at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London.
Emily Dickinson is currently completing her thesis on the relationships between violence, trauma and regionalism in the work of contemporary female American authors. Recent papers include ‘Pinpricks of light that broke my heart’: Trauma, Sexual Violence and Sadomasochism in Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Second Global Conference, Trauma: Theory and Practice, March 2012, Prague, Czech Republic). She has a forthcoming essay entitled ‘“Trash always rises”: Regionalism and violence in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina’ in the journal Peer English (March 2013).
Sarah Downes is currently working on her thesis on the relationship between the Western culture of digital communications technology and the rise of ultra-violent horror cinema since the mid 1990s. Of particular interest are the multi-sensory aspects of interactive technologies and the phenomenological experience of contemporary horror cinema spectatorship. She will be presenting a paper entitled 'See, Seeing, Seen, Saw: A Phenomenology of Ultra-Violent Cinema' at the Cinema of Sensations International Film and Media Studies Conference hosted by the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (May 2012). She will also be presenting a paper, 'Devil With The Black Dress On: Empowerment and Domination in Goth Metal', at the Going Underground? Gender and Subculture symposium at Northumbria University (September 2012).
Kerry Featherstone has a book forthcoming on Bruce Chatwin in the “Writers and their Work” series.
Nicholas Freeman's new book, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain, a wide-ranging study of literature, politics, art, crime, and sport, was published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2011. He gave a lecture about it at University College Falmouth the following month. He presented a paper on urban mysticism at the symposium on G.K. Chesterton at University College London (September 2011) and recently spoke about decadent poetics at Hull University (February 2012). His essay on Arthur Symons’s Spiritual Adventures was published in Victoriographies in November 2011, and his chapter on the Victorian ghost story will be appearing shortly in Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press). He is currently writing another piece on Victorian ghost stories, as well as researching his next book, Longing for the Wood-World at Night: Pagan Presences in English Culture 1860-1939, a study of dissident spiritualities, nature, magic(k) and the occult.
Brian Jarvis's latest book, co-authored with Andrew Dix and Paul Jenner, is
The Contemporary American Novel in Context (Continuum, 2011). Recent essays include a chapter on ‘Thomas Pynchon’ for The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945 (Cambridge University Press; 2011), ‘The Fall of the Hou$e of Finance: gothic economies in recent American fiction’ in Twenty-First Century Gothic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2011) and ‘“It is always another world”: mapping the global imaginary in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in Land and Identity (Rodopi; 2011). Forthcoming essays include ‘“You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend”: towards a rhythmanalysis of the everyday in the cinema of Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant’, in Images of the Everyday (Liverpool University Press; 2012). Brian is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Seeing Red: Don DeLillo, Marxism and Visual Culture and was recently appointed as the American Editor for Literature Compass.
Arianna Maiorani Following the publication of her article “Reading movies as interactive messages: A proposal for a new method of analysis” in Semiotica, 187 – 1/4 , 2011, pp. 167-188, as well as the lecture she was invited to deliver in Seoul on “Dance as an enabling tool: Interdisciplinary potential of the basics of dance movement” for the international conference The Prospects of Dance Studies and Career Research (Korea National Sport University, Seoul, South Korea, October 2011), Arianna Maiorani has been invited to deliver a series on lectures on Multimodality and Film Studies and on dance-based modules in Higher Education in several universities in Slovenia (i.e. Primorska University in Koper, University of Lubljana). She is also involved in the forthcoming international conference The Language of Films (University of Pavia, Italy, September 2012) as a member of the scientific committee, speaker, and participant to the international project English and Italian audiovisual language: translation and language learning (University of Pavia, University of Malta, Loughborough University). Along with other members of the same project she will as well deliver a paper at the European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop 2012 (Bertinoro, Italy, July 2012). She is also currently working with Chris Christie on the edition of a volume that will collect some of the works presented at the international conference Analysing Multimodal Discourse: Multimodality Meets Pragmatics that she and Chris have organised in the English and Drama department in September 2011.
Deirdre O’Byrne will be giving a conference paper, ‘Old and New Knowledges in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing’, IASIL Conference, Maynooth, 26-30 July and a paper entitled, ‘People and landscape in Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride’, NEICN Conference, University of Sunderland, 12-14 November. She is giving the following public talks and workshops: ‘”The Waters and the Wild”: Nature in Irish poetry’ workshop, Southwell Poetry Festival, 17 July; ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, Nottingham Readers’ Day, 27 Nov 2010; ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Worksop Library, 28 Jan 2011; and ‘Diverse Voices: British Multicultural Fiction’, University of 3rd Age, Burleigh Community College, 9 Feb 2011.
Oliver Tearle is working on two books: Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880-1914, which is to be published by Sussex later in 2012; and T. E. Hulme and Modernism, which is forthcoming with Continuum in 2013. He also has forthcoming articles on the Edwardian psychical detective (‘Aylmer Vance and the Paradox of the Paranormal’, in the journal Clues, later in 2012) and on ‘Hamlet and T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men’ (in The Explicator, also later this year). He will be presenting a conference paper on T. E. Hulme (titled ‘Star-eaten’) at the 'Great Writing' conference at Imperial College London in June, and another titled ‘T. E. Hulme and the Matter of Things’ at the 'Material Meanings' conference at Kent in September. His latest book review (of two recent books on Gothic literature) has just been published in English Studies, and another review will appear in the next issue of Textual Practice. He is currently reviewing the Selected Letters of William Empson for the European Journal of English Studies.
Helen Wright has a short essay entitled ‘What is a novel?’ in the forthcoming The English Literature Companion (November 2010), edited by Julian Wolfreys and published by Palgrave Macmillan. She is also Editorial Assistant on Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914 published by Edinburgh University Press.