Graduate students’ research projects

Music and Control in the Nineteenth Century

Additional Information: The first chapter is about the rise of the orchestral conductor in nineteenth-century London

Mixed Media: A Study of American Culture in the Digital Era

Additional Information: My research focuses on American culture in response to the digital era. I will be considering themes of materiality, remediation, image text, space and identity in relation to diverse literary and cultural texts. I will focus on how these five themes are represented in various creative practices, in order to consider how they may frame a particular technocultural moment.

An Examination of the Sound Performance and Visual Poetry of Bob Cobbing

Additional Information: provides an opportunity to develop a theory for flow, a physical manifestation of a process that transcends language

Science, Mysticism, and Astrology in the Work of Samuel Beckett

Additional Information: I am currently looking at the importance of astrology in Beckett's first novel, Murphy. Planets and stars are also frequently referenced in his later work, so I am trying to ascertain whether or not these constitute a continued engagement with astrology, or astronomy. In the future I plan to look into Beckett's attitude towards science, and his engagement with mediums (Hester Dowden) and Renaissance mystic Giordano Bruno.

Peter Gidal and Stan Brakhage Resistance Strategies to the Role and Position of the Subject in Narrative Form

Additional Information: My research focuses on a deep investigation upon the aesthetics of Gidal and Brakhage seen as reactions against the subject in narrative film. In their radical diversity they both articulate the same concern for a more active subject in film process: subject as producer and as consumer of a film. Their positions have their roots in their very different backgrounds: the Marxist tradition for Gidal and the Romantic heritage for Brakhage.

Popular and Artistic Responses to English Mountain Landscape, 1870-1900

Additional Information: I'm looking at change and continuity in attitudes to mountains, examining both the growth of mountaineering as a sport and more general literary and artistic depictions.

Midcentury Gothic: Material Culture and the Modernist Uncanny

Additional information: Reading collections and exhibitions in 1940s and 50s culture as expressions of temporal and spatial dislocation. Areas of research include the Festival of Britain, the curatorial practice of Barbara Jones, and the films of Powell and Pressburger.

The Late Modernist Animal: Non-Mammalian Becoming in Anglo-European Art and Literature

Additional Information: I am interested in the ways in which particular modernist networks during the 1930s are engaged in a metaphorics of the animal, specifically an investment in forms of nonmammalian tropology. By exploring the figures of oviparity, parthenogenesis, reptilian endocrinology, aquatic and avian life through the work of selected Anglo-European artists and writers, this thesis traces the cultural and historical discourses of avant-garde practice through the metaphors of non-mammalian becoming. I am interested in exploring the extent to which this sexual and textual border strains against an Oedipal, mammalian narrative of textual becoming, offering an allegorical relation to the scene of writing itself.

Forms of Knowledge in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis

Additional Information: it is researching ways of perception and communication as they appear in Shakespearean theatre, and in Shakespearean theatre when it appears in psychoanalysis

Laura Salisbury
and
Stephen Clucas

The Architecture of History: Archival Narratives in the Work of Alan Moore

Additional Information: My thesis focuses on historiography and constructions of history in work of Alan Moore, with a particular emphasis on the archive as a model. The archive is in many ways emblematic of Alan Moore’s comics, and indeed his prose, poetry and performance pieces. Archives are figured in Moore’s work as diegetic spaces, via citation and quotation, and are imbricated in the very structure of the texts. The status of the text as material object ensures that these comics, graphic novels and CDs become archival artefacts themselves. It is as a writer of comics that Moore is best known, and the characteristic interplay of text and image makes the form ideally suited for figuring and materialising simultaneous configurations and reconfigurations of past, present and future. In content and form, culturally and materially, the archive as a model and method to navigate and survey Moore’s work is remarkably flexible and potentially revealing as I hope to show.