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Department of English and Humanities
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Laura Salisbury

BA (Warwick), MA (Exeter), PhD (Lond)Laura Salisbury
Lecturer

l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk
020 70790693
room 201B, 30 Russell Sq.
Office hours: Wednesdays, 5-6pm.

 

Dr Laura Salisbury is RCUK Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Culture. My research and teaching interests include modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; gender and language; neuroscience and language. I am currently preparing a monograph on Beckett, comedy and ethics for publication. I am also writing a book for Edinburgh University Press entitled Late Modernisms. My major research project is a study of the relationship between modernity and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language.

My forthcoming work includes a chapter on Adorno and feminism for a volume of essays on feminism and critical theory (ed. Rebecca Munford) and a chapter on narratives of the brain in contemporary British Fiction (The Decades Project: International Perspectives on Contemporary British Fiction). With my colleagues from the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Joe Brooker, Roger Luckhurst and Carol Watts), I am working on an anthology of documents on postwar British culture. I am also preparing an edited collection on the work of Friedrich Kittler with Stephen Sale from the London Consortium.

I am currently supervising PhD students working in the following areas: Beckett and ethics; modernism and the animal; discourses of love in the Western canon; women's confessional poetry and Lacan; modernism, medicine and disability; tattooing and body modification; John Ashbery and cognitive models; late modernism and the body.

I am the convenor of the London Beckett Seminar and am a member of Birkbeck's Chronological Freud Reading Group.

 

Forthcoming Presentations

'Animals that Talk: Neurology, Technicity, and zoon logon ekhon'. Zoontotechnics. Cardiff University, 12-14 May, 2010.

'From Adaptation to Synecdoche: Neurological Turns in Contemporary Fiction'. Contemporary Fiction and Its Contexts. University of Manchester, 1-2 July 2010.

'Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s'. The Decades Project: International Perspectives on Contemporary British Fiction, Research Seminar and Book Series, Brunel University, 1 April 2011.

 

Selected Publications

Edited Collections

Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950. Eds. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).

Other Becketts. Eds. Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor, Laura Salisbury (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002)

Articles

'Art of Noise: Beckett's Language in a Culture of Information'. Samuel Beckett Aujourd'hui 22 (2010) (forthcoming).

'Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan's Mother Tongue', Textual Practice (2010) (forthcoming).

'"What Is the Word": Beckett's Aphasic Modernism', Journal of Beckett Studies 17 (2008): 80-128.

'Michel Serres: Science, Fiction, and the Shape of the Relation', Science Fiction Studies 33 (2006) : 30-52.

'Beside Oneself: Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude', Parallax 11 (2005) : 81-92.

'Introduction' (with Daniela Caselli and Steven Connor), Other Becketts. Spec. issue of Journal of Beckett Studies (2002) : i-xiv.

'"So the unreasoning goes": Comic Timing and Trembling in Ill Seen Ill Said', Samuel Beckett Aujourd'hui 11 (2001) : 372-382.

Book Chapters

'Linguistic Trepanation: Brain Damage, Penetrative Seeing, and the Revolution of the Word', in Minds, Bodies and Machines, eds. Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (forthcoming).

'"Something or Nothing": Beckett and the Matter of Language', in Beckett and Nothing, ed. Daniela Caselli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

'Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity', in Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, eds. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 204-230.

'Introduction', Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, eds. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).

'"Throw up for Good": Gagging, Compulsion and a Comedy of Ethics in the Trilogy', in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2009).

'Laughing Matters: The Comic Timing of Irish Joking', in Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism, ed. Graeme Harper (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 158-74.

 
Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, 30 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DT. Tel: 020 7631 6861