categorising things

I have a week of events coming up:

• Monday 28 April: giving a guest lecture at Bath Spa University for an English Literature module called ‘Reading Communities’

• Wednesday 30 April: heading to London to participate as an advisory group member for 2 days at Birkbeck for the ‘Recovery Histories’ oral history project

• Saturday 3 May: talking at Tate St Ives about Ithel Colquhoun: Between Worlds.

Volcanic Landscape, c. 1941, Colquhoun (+ filters)

These three very different occasions – with no connection other than being in the same week – have prompted me to reflect on my academic directions. That the first is at Bath where I started out on my BA, and the second at Birkbeck where I did my MA & PhD, also feels significant. I’d like to draw some kind of map through some of the fields my career has spanned to find a way of navigating or taking stock... and so I’ve come up with a few broad overlapping categories into which to group my books, etc.:

Sound and vibration

Books & special issue

• Senses of Vibration (Bloomsbury, 2012)

• Vibratory Modernism, edited with Enns (Palgrave, 2013)

• ‘Vibratory Movements’, special issue of Senses & Society (2008)

• Chapters 3-5 of Rocks of Nation are also vibratory, with their ‘trembling rocks’ and ‘savage vibrations’ (Manchester University Press, 2015).

• Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (Palgrave, 2011) (more sound than vibration)

• Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2023) (again sound rather than vibration)

  
  

Articles & chapters

• ‘“Upwards of 20,000”: Extrasensory Quantities of Railway Shock’, in Senses & Society

• ‘Nerves, Vibration and the Aeolian Harp’, Romanticism & Victorianism (2009)

• ‘Nerve-Vibration: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s & 1890s’, Neurology & Modernity, ed. Salisbury & Shail (2010)

• ‘Tomboys and Girly Boys in George Eliot’s Fiction’, The Victorian Novel and Masculinity, ed. Mallett (more trembling nerves) (2015)

• 'Auto/biographical oral history, from "oral memoirs" to The Life of Nate Shaw’, Oral History (2017)

• 'Vibrations', Literature and Sound, ed. Snaith (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Essays/creative nonfiction

• ‘Barking, Clocks, and the Printer: Accidental Sounds in Oral History’, Australian Humanities Review (2022)

• ‘Tidal’, an audio essay in Sonic Faction (Urbanomic 2024)

Audio/radio/music/events

• 'Libraries of Voices' and 'Peripheral Vibrations', Unsound / Undead (Univocal, 2019) – with podcast reading.

• Designed and presented three radio programmes, with Sarah Pyke, on Soho Radio (2020): now available here.

• ‘Vibrations, Senses & Energies’, Energy Consciousness Lecture (2022)

• Moderator for a Guggenheim forum, Sympathetic Vibrations; wrote 4 pieces that I hope to find on some old floppy disc or something, among other events… e.g. loved Tuned City @ Brussels & talking about sirens...

• Used to play lots in bands! Most live but e.g. some flute here.

Oral history, life writing

 Books & special issue

• Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (Palgrave, 2011)

• Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2023)

• 'Interviews and Reading', themed section of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 16: 1 (2019)

Articles

• ‘Clayscapes: Views of a Working Landscape, from Poetry to Oral History’, Cornish Studies 17 (2009)

• 'Auto/biographical oral history, from "oral memoirs" to The Life of Nate Shaw, Oral History (2017)

• '"Me mum likes a book, me dad's a newspaper man": Reading, Gender and Domestic Life in 100 Families', Participations (2019)

• ‘Memories of Fiction: Oral Histories of Reading Experiences’, Words & Silences (2019)

• 'Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading', Book History 23 (2020) (for a free draft copy see here).

  
  

Projects

• Memories of Fiction: Oral Histories of Readers’ Lives - essays & things on this website

• Living Libraries - love this website! lots of things to look at & listen to (designed by Sarah Pyke with my support as project lead)

• I was a Trustee for the Oral History Society from 2008 until 2020, organising various conferences etc.

Environment, place, rocks, Cornwall

Books & special issue

• Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (2011)

• Mysticism, Myth, and Celtic Identity, coedited with Gibson & Tregidga (2013)

• Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester UP, 2015).

• Cornish Studies 17, coedited with Payton, themed issue ‘Sustainability and the Clay Country’ (2009)

Articles & chapters

• ‘Primitive Rocks: Humphry Davy, Mining and the Sublime Landscapes of Cornwall’, Journal of Literature and Science (2014)

• ‘Clayscapes: Views of a Working Landscape, from Poetry to Oral History’, Cornish Studies 17 (2009)

• ‘On the Cliff Edge of England: Tourism and Imperial Gothic in Cornwall’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012)

• ‘Supernatural Nationalism and New Age Ecology’, in Written on Stone (2009)

• ‘Geological Folklore: Robert Hunt and the Industrial, Aesthetic, and Racial Composition of ‘Celtic’ Cornwall’, in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity (2013)

Talks & other pieces & creative writing

• I was one of four professors who launched Roehampton's Climate Network, and contributed to a panel discussion here: https://blog.roehampton.ac.uk/2021/04/22/roehampton-climate-network-launch/

• Lots in our Living Libraries project about libraries as environmental, e.g. here.

• Did a ton of work on how literature and reading and libraries could motivate environmental action and put in a big AHRC bid but didn't get the funding :-( (it was good though to contribute in the process e.g. to CILIP's Green Libraries.)

• Spoke at a MESKLA symposium on rocks, Cornishness and environmental crisis among other related things - recordings here.

• My first novel manuscript, Ghost Snow & River - developed with Arts Council funding and soon to be under submission to agents - is propelled by climate crisis (featuring especially a flooding river...)

Reading and libraries

Projects & book

• Memories of Fiction

• Living Libraries

• Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Essays & other stuff

• 'An oral history of readers' lives in libraries', post for the Libraries Taskforce

• 'How reading and libraries shape our lives', The Big Issue

• 'Interviews and Reading', themed section of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, with article '"Me mum likes a book, me dad's a newspaper man": Reading, Gender and Domestic Life in 100 Families' (2019)

• ‘Memories of Fiction: Oral Histories of Reading Experiences’, Words & Silences (2019)

• 'Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading', Book History 23 (2020) (for a free draft copy see here).

• 'Auto/biographical oral history, from "oral memoirs" to The Life of Nate Shaw, Oral History (2017)

• And one of my freelance roles is now Coordinator of the South Western Regional Library Services...

Psychology, memory, and trauma

• Senses of Vibration - there's loads on the history of psychology and neurology and related topics here, and for a history of 'traumatic shock' especially: Ch. 4. 'Pathological Motions: Railway Shock, Street Noises, Earthquakes' and ‘“Upwards of 20,000”: Extrasensory Quantities of Railway Shock’, in Senses & Society

  
  

• Memories of Fiction - a project oriented around memory, specifically memories of fiction (novels etc) but also thinking about memory as narrated in oral history conversations and more broadly. Publications most focused around these topics include:

  • 'Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading', Book History 23 (2020) (for a free draft copy see here).

  • ‘Memories of Fiction: Oral Histories of Reading Experiences’, Words & Silences (2019)

  • Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2023) - the final chapter also discusses trauma and memory, among other things like the misuse of academic authority.

  • 'Reading, Race, and Remembering Childhood Abuse—Returning to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings', Life Writing (2023) - more on traumatic memory.

    
    

• My creative writing continues to manifest my preoccupations with trauma and memory, as indicated in a version of the opening of my first novel draft that won the Plaza Literary Prize and is published in Anthology 1 that can be downloaded freely here. More - I hope - to come!

  
  

• My interest in reading and mental health as indicated in the previous section (e.g. my article 'Forgetting Fiction') is matched by my interest in writing...

Gothic and other literary studies

Working across disciplines, my academic background and Professorship are in English Literature, spanning sub-specialisms including:

Gothic studies, e.g. ‘On the Cliff Edge of England: Tourism and Imperial Gothic’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012); Rocks of Nation: 'Haunted houses and prehistoric stones: savage vibrations in ghost stories...' (this book's original title was Rocks and Ghosts, so ghosts are a strong presence throughout) (2015); my drafted novel also has gothic elements, Ghost Snow & River...

Romanticism, e.g. ‘Nerves, Vibration and the Aeolian Harp’, Romanticism & Victorianism (2009); chapters 1-2 in Rocks of Nation; chapters 1-3 in Place, Writing & Voice in Oral History (2012)

Victorian studies, e.g. most of Senses of Vibration (2012); ch.1 of Sound Writing (2023); ‘Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s & 1890s’, Neurology & Modernity, ed. Salisbury & Shail (2010)

Modernism, e.g. Vibratory Modernism (2013); chapters 3-4 of Rocks of Nation (e.g. D. H. Lawrence)

Contemporary, e.g. chapters 5-6 of Rocks of Nation; most of Sound Writing

Literature and science, e.g. most of Senses of Vibration (review by the British Society of Literature & Science, plus shortlisted for the BSLS book prize); and Rocks of Nation (another BSLS review); ‘Primitive Rocks: Humphry Davy, Mining and the Sublime Landscapes of Cornwall’, Journal of Literature and Science (2014)

Feminism, e.g. chapters 5-7 of Sound Writing.

I'm running out of steam here while also feeling an insatiable desire to categorise my entire life, so will just mention book history/the material book (overlaps with reading), ecocriticism (environment above), cultural and new materialism (vibrations and rocks...), and numerous other theoretical and disciplinary areas that I've engaged with more briefly e.g. archaeology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and earlier literary periods, before running for the hills.

Creative writing

My 'selected work' lists quite a few. I also did a little interview in Inkfish magazine about Cornwall and links between academic and creative writing.

To loop back finally to sound: my novels-in-progress are written with an ear to the rhythmic forms we can find in literature; I aim for their heights to sing.

So now I have this list of categories to tidy lots of my mess into, and it all seems to make much more sense :-)

PS

reminded of a “Chinese encyclopedia” in which “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off ”look like flies”.

(Foucault's The Order of Things.)