Department of English – Arts Matter

Publishing Success for Creative Writing PhD Student Ash Bond – Peregrine Quinn

Posted on September 27, 2023December 16, 2024 by George Thomas

By Ash Bond, PhD Creative Writing student, School of Humanities

As the first proofs of her debut novel arrive in bookshops, PhD Creative Writing student Ash Bond introduces us to the wonderful world of Peregrine Quinn and explains how her time at Bristol has influenced her writing.

My debut novel Peregrine Quinn and the Cosmic Realm is the first in a fantasy series, aimed at – primarily – an audience of nine to twelve-year-olds, what those in the publishing sphere refer to as ‘Middle Grade’. Middle Grade is where you will find The Chronicles of Narnia, Artemis Fowl, and Percy Jackson. It is also where you used to find Harry Potter, but now of course he gets his very own section (with matching rucksacks and light-up pens).

The idea that a magical world is just a wardrobe or a train platform away is commonplace on these shelves. In Middle Grade books if you say the right spells, tap the right rock, or mess with the wrong fairy, you could end up – quite literally – anywhere. In Peregrine Quinn, the entrance to the Cosmic Realm lies behind a bookshelf in a library (I am a writer with a vivid imagination, but I am also an academic and, as the adage goes, write what you know). It is in one of these libraries where the first book begins, with Peregrine and her godfather Daedalus breaking into Portal Number Nine in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

One of my greatest joys in writing fantasy books for children is in framing these opportunities for the reader to look at this world, a world that can often appear so devoid of wonder, with renewed curiosity. Is that person on the Tube looking at a map of the London Underground, or the Under-Underground? Check next time, you just never know.

“The weaving of myth and imagination, of research and creativity, is a skill that the Creative Writing PhD at Bristol offers much practice in”

As I transition into the second year of my PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol, I am also moving onto write the second in the Peregrine series. In this second book, the library door is opened wider, and the reader is invited further into the Cosmic Realm. As the world expands, I find myself drawing more and more upon the mythology that forms the basis of much of Peregrine’s universe, a universe that is at once both familiar, and deeply strange. Hekate for example, the classical goddess of witchcraft, in Peregrine’s world runs HekTek Laboratories and specialises in poisons. Daedalus, the architect who designed Minos’s famous labyrinth, in this novel has designed the portal system that connects the Terran Realm (Earth) with that of the Cosmic Realm (Olympus).

The weaving of myth and imagination, of research and creativity, is a skill that the Creative Writing PhD at Bristol offers much practice in. The Creative Writing PhD itself is made up of two strands: one creative and one critical, and is designed so that both strands complement and elevate each other. Like all PhD students, I am lucky enough to have two supervisors; one in Creative Writing, Dr Joanna Nadin, and one in Myth, Dr Vanda Zajko. Both of my supervisors are incredibly generous with their support and rigorous in their feedback, offering me the opportunity to grow as both a writer and as an academic.

The second book is only half written, and with at least one more book to write in this series I am beyond grateful for the consistent opportunities for inspiration – mythological and otherwise – that are offered by the dynamic, interdisciplinary academic environment provided by the university. And while I am very much at the beginning of both my PhD and my publication journey, I look forward to working with Bristol University as Peregrine’s adventure continues.

Ash Bond is a PhD Creative Writing student who recently secured a three-book deal with Piccadilly Press to bring her Peregrine Quinn series to life. The first book, Peregrine Quinn and the Cosmic Realm, will be published in April 2024 by Piccadilly Press which you can pre-order now. To find out more about Ash’s research, please email xn22400@bristol.ac.uk.

Place and Space in the Early Modern World Workshop, 10 May 2023 – Early Modern Studies Research Group

Posted on August 31, 2023December 16, 2024 by George Thomas

By Dr Sebastiaan Verweij, Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature, and Amy Smith, PhD History candidate

To continue our Faculty Research Centre and Group catch-ups, Dr Sebastiaan Verweij and PhD History candidate Amy Smith tell us about the highly innovative and interdisciplinary May workshop put on by the Early Modern Studies research group.

On 10 May, the Early Modern Studies (EMS) research group ran a workshop: ‘Place and Space in the Early Modern World’. Place and Space studies, including attention to landscape and environment, cuts through the research activities of EMS members in many different disciplines (including English, History, History of Art, Modern Languages, Theatre, Philosophy, Archaeology), and the workshop was organised as a way to share research methods, materials, and findings. Among our c. 40 delegates were also five colleagues from the Universities of Exeter and Cardiff, in part because EMS is keen to develop research collaboration with members of GW4, a research alliance group made up of the universities of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter. We were also joined by PhD students in the Faculty currently on the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWWDTP) scholarships (with thanks for some additional funding from SWWDTP!).

Dr Sebastiaan Verweij opens the ‘Place and Space in the Early Modern World’ workshop

Most of the workshop took the form of five-minute flashpapers, delivered by 17 colleagues in short panels. For any academic researcher to stop talking at the five-minute mark is no easy feat. However, all speakers deliver punchy, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge papers on diverse topics that felt nonetheless connected and in immediate conversation with others on the day. Topics included sea board spaces, Arthurian landscapes, castle gardens as women’s spaces, portable places and soil in cemeteries, British cathedral precincts, recreating the perambulation of Bristol’s city boundaries, flood lands, Italian urban space, dramatic space in the early modern theatre, the spaces of city comedy, urban space in Manilla, the philosophical precepts of space in time from Aristotle to Newton, the space of tragedy, and what urban planners refer to as ‘Space Left Over After Planning’. The day was concluded with an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging keynote address by Professor Nicola Whyte, a social and landscape historian at Exeter, on ‘Sacred landscapes and the subterranean imagination’, which took in Renaissance Italian painting, contemporary art, the seventeenth-century travel journals of Celia Fiennes, and heritage studies, as a way to understand premodern and contemporary response and approach to the landscapes that lie beneath our feet.

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The workshop left us feeling like there was a great deal more to discuss, and so EMS has resolved to work out a way in which conversations can continue: perhaps in the form of future meetings, and through exploration of funding opportunities such as those offered by GW4, in order to organise more ambitious events (conferences, symposia, or collaborations beyond the university).

The PGR perspective by Amy Smith, PhD History candidate

PGR students (postgraduate research students) often chat about how ‘at home’ we feel in the School of Humanities. Whether we’ve been kicking around Bristol for years or only just joined, we all feel welcome at higher level academic events across the department. The Place and Space workshop on May 10th was no different. With so many stimulating topics, we joined in lively Q&A sessions and indulged in the sacred landscapes explored in Nicola Whyte’s keynote.

It was especially inspiring to see recently graduated doctoral students speaking alongside academics with a long publishing record. With several of us in the latter stages of our doctorates, it was a comforting glimpse into a potential future. Next time, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a number of PGR faces on the panels as we start to develop our scholarly profiles within the University and beyond.

The workshop was made possible by Faculty of Arts research group core funding, some additional funds from the Faculty, and a travel subvention for SWWDTP students.

The Early Modern Studies Research Group aspires to generate a sense of community for scholars from across the faculty (and beyond) who work on some aspect of the period from c.1400 to c.1800. To find out more about the Group’s activities, research and to join the mailing list, please contact s.verweij@bristol.ac.uk or richard.stone@bristol.ac.uk.

Introducing the ‘Remaking Britain’ project in South Asian Heritage Month

Posted on August 8, 2023December 16, 2024 by George Thomas

By Professor Sumita Mukherjee, Dr Florian Stadtler, Dr Aleena Din, Dr Rehana Ahmed and Dr Maya Parmar

We’re excited to launch the new project Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the present. Remaking Britain is an AHRC-funded research project led by the University of Bristol (Sumita Mukherjee, PI and Florian Stadtler, Co-I) and Queen Mary University of London (Rehana Ahmed, Co-I) in partnership with the British Library. Aleena Din (Bristol) and Maya Parmar (QMUL) are researchers on the project.

Remaking Britain will reveal the significance of South Asian people and communities as agents of change to Britain’s cultural, economic, political and social life from the period of empire in the 1830s to the present. Through the exploration of archival records and the capturing of oral histories, the project will produce a free, interactive and widely accessible digital resource with accompanying learning materials and oral history interviews, designed for researchers of all types from academics to community and family historians, to interested members of the public.

We are working closely with the Bristol Research IT team, led by Tessa Alexander, with Mike Jones, as well as user experience consultant Stu Church and web designer Tom Waterhouse. This resource, with roughly 750 entries, will be launched in the summer of 2025.

To mark South Asian Heritage Month, which takes place between 18th July-17th August, we have spotlighted five individuals, events and organisations which will feature in our digital resource.

Atiya Fyzee (1877-1967), author, social reformer and arts patron

Image of Atiya Fyzee wearing a head-covering light-colored veil with a pearl ornament, and an embroidered/jeweled bodice. — Atiya Fyzee. Source: Basanta Koomar Roy, “Picturesque India”, The Mentor vol. 9 (May 1, 1921).

As a youth, Atiya was involved in women’s organisations and made contributions to reformist journals for Muslim women, including Tahzib un-niswan (Lahore) and Khatun (Aligarh). She was sent to London by her parents for an education and undertook a teaching qualification at Maria Grey Training College. While in London, Atiya wrote a travel diary which documented her networks and connections in Britain. This was later published as Zamana–i-tahsil (A Time of Education) in 1921.

During her short time in Britain, she became part of influential social networks, travelled across Europe and made significant cultural contributions through her groundbreaking observations of life as a Muslim woman in early 20th century Britain.

Amrit Kaur (1889-1964), activist and politician

Image of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, from a 1936 issue of ''The Indian Listener''. Amrit has her head covered with a shawl and is sat down looking towards the camera. — Amrit Kaur. Source: “Rajkumari Amrit Kaur”, The Indian Listener (November 7, 1936): 1096.

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was a leading member of the Indian suffrage movement in the 1920s and 1930s, visiting London numerous times to campaign for Indian women’s rights, and went on to become Independent India’s first female cabinet minister.

Amrit Kaur was the first Indian to study at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset. She joined the school in 1902, following the coronation of Edward VII, and left in 1906 as Head Girl and Captain of Games. Amrit Kaur also served as one of Mahatma Gandhi’s private secretaries for 16 years and was an active member of the non-cooperation movement. In 1950, her suffrage campaigning saw success as the new constitution of India enfranchised all adult men and women over the age of 21.

Chuni Lal Katial (1898-1978), doctor and politician

Chuni Lal Katial graduated with a degree in medicine from Lahore University, and then continued his studies in Liverpool in public health and tropical medicine in 1927. After moving to London, he initially worked as a doctor in Canning Town, and later set up a surgery in Finsbury, attending mainly to working class communities. He was elected as a councillor for the Labour Party in 1934, and in 1938 he became the first South Asian mayor in the UK. He was a driving force as Chairman of the Public Health Committee in the setting up of the pioneering Finsbury Health Centre, which offered a range of health facilities all in one location, including a tuberculosis clinic, dentist and women’s clinic. During the Second World War, Katial was a civil defence medical officer.

Katial was also heavily involved with the campaigning pressure group the India League. During the Second Round Table Conference in 1931, he became Gandhi’s chaperone in London, and a famous meeting between Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin took place at his house.

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M K Gandhi meeting actor, Charlie Chaplin, in London’s East End. Also in the picture from left to right are: Dr Katial and the poet, Sarojini Naidu, 22nd September 1931 (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

Indian Writing (1940-45)

South Asian writers played a significant part in London’s literary and political life in the early twentieth century. One node of a substantial network which connected South Asian, British and other anti-colonial writers, intellectuals and activists was the magazine Indian Writing (1940-45), edited by Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, Krishnarao Shelvankar and Alagu Subramaniam. Run from Sasadhar Sinha’s Bibliophile Bookshop, located just a stone’s throw from the British Museum at 16 Little Russell Street, the magazine published short fiction, non-fiction and book reviews. On the cusp of Indian independence, it brought together fierce political critique and literary talent at the heart of the imperial metropolis.

Image of an advertisement for Indian Writing magazine. The advertisement reads: 'Indian Writing: A New Quarterly. The spring number contains stories, articles, and reviews by Mulk Raj Anand, Iqbal Singh, K. S. Shelvankar, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, A. Subramaniam, Cedric Dover, and others.' — Advertisement for Indian Writing, published in the magazine, Life and Letters and the London Mercury and Bookman [Shelfmark: P.P.5939.bgf.; Courtesy of the British Library]

South Asians and the NHS

The NHS as we know it today has been built – and continues to be sustained – by migrant contributions. South Asians have played a major role in this. But we can place South Asians in the medical profession in Britain, long before the NHS was formed. Bari Chohan, who shared his family history for the Millenium Memory Bank (MMB), described how his family arrived in England in the 1870s, having practiced homeopathy and opthalmics on the subcontinent. They then opened medical clinics all over England. Bari’s great uncle Dr Chirag Din Chohan, who was a hakim (practitioner of alternative medicine) and an eye specialist, opened his first practice in Harrogate in the early 1920s. He later moved to his wife Florence’s hometown of Middlesbrough in 1925 where, in 1933, he opened a practice on Kensington Road. In 1937, Dr Chohan opened a second practice on nearby Linthorpe Road.

Embed from Getty Images

An Indian doctor examines a patient, UK, October 1955. Original publication: Picture Post – 8572 – Indians in London – unpub. (Photo by Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)]

The team chose to spotlight these lives and organisations as they showcase the wide range of interests of the project including gender, literary and cultural life, political activism and campaigning, religion, as well as workers’ experiences.

Contact us

We’d love to hear from anyone with project queries, expressions of interest in oral history participation, or any information relating to the rich history of South Asians in Britain from the 1830s to the present.

To contact the project team, please email remaking-britain-project@bristol.ac.uk.

You can find more information on how to contact us on our website, including our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Performing Shakespeare at Sea – The Hamlet Voyage

Posted on July 13, 2023December 11, 2024 by George Thomas

By Dr Laurence Publicover, Senior Lecturer in English, School of Humanities

Dr Laurence Publicover discusses his contribution to a new play, The Hamlet Voyage, performed at the Bristol Harbour Festival in 2022. The project received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account Award and underlines the positive social influence arts and humanities research can effect.

The Hamlet Voyage performed aboard The Matthew in Bristol. Image Credit: Edward Felton

In January 2021, I held a video conference call with a Bristol-based American theatre director named Ben Prusiner. For some years, it turned out, both of us had been intrigued by the enigmatic evidence surrounding a specific performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: one supposed to have taken place aboard an East India Company (EIC) ship off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607.

Shipboard theatricals

If this performance did take place—and its reality continues to be the subject of debate—then it is not only the first recorded performance of Shakespeare outside Europe; it is the first recorded performance, anywhere, of Hamlet. (Shakespeare’s tragedy was written and first performed around 1600, and versions of it were published in 1603 and then 1604-5, but there are no surviving records of specific performances before 1607.) To make things even more intriguing, the voyage on which this performance may or may not have taken place involved the first English ship to reach mainland India—a region that the EIC, at this point a fledging enterprise, would later rule.

All this interests me not only because I work on Shakespeare, but also because, in recent years, I have become interested in what people read, write, and perform on board ships; in fact, before Ben and I made contact, I had alluded to the episode off the coast of Sierra Leone in the introduction to a volume of essays on this topic.

The Hamlet Voyage

Ben didn’t simply want to talk to a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast; he wanted my help in developing a play about the possible performance of Hamlet. With staggering energy and imagination, he then realised this vision over the following eighteen months, commissioning a script from the British-Nigerian playwright Rex Obano (who had written previously on Africa and early modern England, and who had also, before becoming a playwright, been an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and involving a team of academics and creative practitioners with expertise relating to the story. With the help of Jiamiao Chen, who worked as a research assistant, my role in the project was to locate and help interpret primary and secondary literature concerning the third voyage of the East India Company—and in addition, to help Rex and Ben think about shipboard theatricals and about the texts of Hamlet with which the English sailors might have been working.

We trialled the first draft of Rex’s script at the University of Bristol’s Department of Theatre over the summer of 2021, working with student volunteers, and then ran a second series of workshops that autumn at the Trinity Centre in Easton, where Ben invited members of Bristol’s West African and South Asian communities to watch rehearsals and ask questions. With support from several funding bodies, including Arts Council England, the University of Bristol’s Participatory Research Fund and its Impact Acceleration Fund, and the Fenton Arts Trust, The Hamlet Voyage—as the play was titled—went into rehearsal in London in the early summer of 2022. I travelled to London to speak to the cast about the historical background of the play and about why (and how) people might have performed Shakespeare during a long voyage; in addition, I helped the actors playing English sailors to rehearse the scenes from Shakespeare that Rex had incorporated into his play.

The Bristol Harbour Festival

The Hamlet Voyage premiered at the 2022 Bristol Harbour Festival on board the Matthew, the replica of the ship on which John Cabot sailed from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497; it then transferred to London for a run at the Bridewell Theatre. On the morning of the first performance, Rex and I spoke about the play on BBC Radio Bristol, and the interviewer asked the question that I’ve been asked countless times since: Did this performance of Hamlet really happen? I direct anyone wishing for a response to that question to the piece I wrote for the project’s website.

Education Outreach

That website was also the basis for an education programme that reached around 200 students across four Bristol schools in 2022. Across four sessions, students were asked to think about the possible performance of Hamlet in a number of different ways: for example, through West African forms of storytelling and through English modes of record-keeping (specifically, diary-writing).

Future Projects

Working on this project has influenced my work in a number of ways. I now have a better sense of what is involved in turning research into a creative output, and I’ve been inspired to keep reading and thinking about the early voyages of the EIC: I’m now writing an essay on those journeys for a volume of essays to be produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol, a Strategic Research Institute at the University of Bristol. I’m also working with Rosie Hunt from Bristol’s School of Education to develop a series of Shakespeare-related materials linked to the project and aimed at A-Level and GCSE students.

The Hamlet Voyage performed at the Bridewell Theatre, London. Image Credit: Dan Fearon

Even if it never happened—and I keep changing my mind over whether it did or didn’t—this performance of Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone is a wonderful story to think with, posing questions concerning the social dynamics of shipboard spaces; the place of Shakespeare in histories of globalization and imperialism; and the role of theatre in diplomatic and cultural exchange. Among all the video calls I held during the pandemic, the one with Ben in January 2021 was by some distance the most consequential.

Dr Laurence Publicover is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English with research interests in Shakespeare and other English Renaissance dramatists and in the relationship between humans and oceans. To find out more about Laurence’s research and The Hamlet Voyage, please email l.publicover@bristol.ac.uk.

The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science: Who we are and what we do

Posted on April 6, 2023December 11, 2024 by George Thomas

By Professor Ulrika Maude, Director of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science

The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science (CHHS) focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research at the intersection of the humanities, health, medicine, and science. The CHHS was inaugurated in 2017 and it has almost two hundred members from across Bristol University’s six Faculties and from the NHS. It runs a regular research seminar with speakers from across the UK as well as from abroad, and hosts workshops, an annual lecture, public debates, mentoring lunches, funding workshops, postgraduate-led activities, and university-wide networking events.

CHHS members are at the forefront of developments in medical humanities research, disseminating their results through academic publications, events and public engagement activities. With the support of the Wellcome Trust and the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute, the CHHS has provided seed-corn funding for a diverse range of research projects, including grief and mourning; the senses; chronic conditions and their narratives; and health and illness in colonial film archives.

One CHHS seedcorn-funded project, Becoming Elizabeth Blackwell, centres on the Bristol-born doctor and social campaigner Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) – the first British woman to be registered as a doctor by the General Medical Council, in 1859. The project has brought together Bristol academics, a playwright and theatre director, medical students and others to produce a playscript that will re-tell and celebrate Blackwell’s life and achievements.

Several CHHS members are currently involved in collectively writing a book on Key Concepts in Medical Humanities (forthcoming, 2024), which will provide a critical introduction to concepts such as ‘health’, ‘illness’, ‘contagion’, ‘feeling’, ‘neurodiversity’, ‘disability’, and ‘dying’, as well as offering chapters on key methodologies such as ‘Black Health Humanities’, ‘Graphic Medicine’, ‘Medicine and the Arts’ and ‘Narrative Medicine’. ‘Health’, for instance, is by no means a transparent concept, and the CHHS’s former Benjamin Meeker Professor, Alexandra Parvan, argues that ‘health cannot be taken merely as the outcome of biological tests or a clean medical sheet, nor should it necessarily be understood as a state restricted to the those designated as clinically healthy.’ Rather, Parvan argues for a nuanced conception of health, one that is ‘accessible to all’.

Current large-scale research initiatives at the CHHS include Sensing Spaces of Healthcare, led by historian Victoria Bates. Poor hospital design has a negative impact on healthcare outcomes, and the project seeks to rethink the NHS Hospital through the body and the senses, focusing on the lived experience of patients, visitors, and hospital staff with the aim of improving hospital design. And a multidisciplinary team led by philosopher Havi Carel has recently won Wellcome Trust funding for a six-year project on Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (EPIC), which aims to address inequalities. Havi says,

‘Some patients have reported that their testimonies and perspectives are ignored, dismissed, or explained away by the healthcare profession. These experiences are classified by philosophers as ‘epistemic injustices’ because, in some cases, they are based on prejudice and can jeopardise patient care and undermine trust in healthcare staff and systems.’

EPIC aims to identify practical measures that can be taken for the benefit of patients and healthcare practitioners alike.

The Good Grief Festival, inaugurated in 2020, focuses on supporting those affected by the shared experience of bereavement and grief – topics that have for too long been considered taboo. Led by Lesel Dawson (English) and Lucy Selman (Bristol Medical School), ‘Good Grief’ regularly organises talks, interviews, webinars and workshops for the general public concentrating on the ways in which the crushing experience of grief can be shared and managed.

Notable projects from recent years include The Heart of the Matter exhibition, which toured the UK in 2018. The exhibition grew from artist Sofie Layton’s residency at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and was co-organised by CHHS Advisory Board member and bioengineer Giovanni Biglino. The artworks in the exhibition were inspired by young patients with heart conditions – as well as their families and doctors – and it invited visitors to discover the extraordinary complexity, intricacy and beauty of the heart as an organ.

For many years now the Centre has been involved in medical education through the Intercalated BA in Medical Humanities, an optional one-year degree for students of Medicine and Veterinary Science, taught jointly by English and Philosophy and directed by Advisory Board member, John Lee (English). With a wide range of international collaborators and an International Advisory Board, our members are also active in public engagement work through collaborations with the NHS, patient groups, and charities as well as museums, public gardens, libraries, and other cultural organisations.

For more information about the CHHS, please contact the Centre’s administrator, Elizabeth Gourd (e.c.gourd@bristol.ac.uk).

Professor Ulrika Maude, Centre for Health, Humanities and Science Director

Black Lecturer – Philip Leverhulme Prize

Posted on March 8, 2023December 11, 2024 by George Thomas

By Dr Josie Gill, Associate Professor in Black British Writing, School of Humanities

With thanks to The Leverhulme Trust for their consent to republish piece in February 2023 newsletter on ArtsMatter platforms.

Fewer than 1% of professors at UK universities are black. The implications of this startling statistic have been much debated, and sociologists and educational researchers are increasingly studying the experiences of black academics. As a literary scholar and a black woman, I am interested in exploring narratives about black people in higher education in literature, memoir and life writing. While many such accounts exist in the US, there are far fewer literary and autobiographical representations of black British academic life, no doubt a reflection of the fact that there are, and have historically been, so few of us. Black British writing about UK education has tended to focus on the school level; for example, E.R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love (1959), Dillibe Onyeama’s Black Boy at Eton (1972) and Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher (1976).

Photograph of Josie Gill, smiling, looking off to the left. — *Image Credit: Artur Tixiliski*

I am using my Leverhulme Prize funds to write a book called Black Lecturer, which will bring my own experiences of working in higher education into conversation with fictional and non-fictional writing about black British experiences of education. I aim to illuminate the ways in which black academics move through university life, as a means to examine the institutional and research cultures that characterise twenty-first-century UK academia. This project includes a close look at the politics of race in my own discipline, literary studies, and how black British writing has been historically addressed within it. Using the history of the English department at the University of Bristol as a case study, my book will connect personal reflection with literary, disciplinary and institutional analysis to explore the significance of race in higher education. 

My approach to writing this book differs significantly from my previous work. I aim to draw parallels between the strategies, structures, affects and language that characterise my everyday experience as a black lecturer; literary methodologies; and the characteristics of institutional culture. The book will be organised around a series of themes which traverse these areas and will model, in its approach and structure, a methodology for literary research in which the archive is expanded to include my emails, where textual analysis includes institutional statements and departmental strategy, and close reading moves beyond text to include bodies and interpersonal interactions. I hope my research will contribute to ongoing discussions about how we study English Literature and demonstrate how accounts of the black British experience can inform this debate.