Please join us for a symposium in honour of our project’s primary investigator, Prof. Dr Virginia Richter. As you can tell from the poster, it will be centred around blue and littoral studies, to which Virginia Richter has made many valuable contributions throughout her academic career. Moreover, we are planning to give a first look at our literary geographical atlas of the beach in the long 20th century, the digital humanities side of the project, on which we have been working for the past four years.
Under the Title “Shifting Shores: Transition and Transformation in/on the Literary Beach”, the project team will give a panel at this year’s conference of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment.
Paper Titles and Presenters:
Dead End: Apocalypse and Regeneration on the Beach (Virgina Richter)
Transformations in Littoral Space: Abjection, Dissolution, and Creativity in Novels about Violent Displacement (Ursula Kluwick)
Islands of Time: Entangled Temporalities in Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (Guðrun í Jákupsstovu)
Sealskins, Scales and Silken Hair: Transformability as Resistance in Merfolk Literature (Marion Troxler)
In honour of our Primary Investigator, Prof. Dr Virginia Richter, the project team and the Department of English at the University of Bern, sponsored by the SNSF and the Irish Embassy, are hosting a symposium. The keynote speaker will be Prof. Dr John Brannigan from the University of Bristol. Get in touch with any of our project team if you would like to participate!
Marion Troxler and Guðrun í Jákupsstovu are organising a BA workshop on “Thinking with the Seabed” this Spring, and have invited Dr. Giulia Champion to hold it. Dr. Champion is currently an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, and is co-leading the RSE-funded project “Scottish Shores: Gothic Coastal Environments” alongside Dr. Emily Alder. Her workshop will investigate littoral workspaces underwater, under the title of “Thinking with the Seabed & the Speculative Infrastructures of Deep-Sea Mining”.
The workshop will take place on the 26 April 2024, from 9.15 am-4pm and will unfortunately only allow for in-person attendance.
Dr Joan Passey from the University of Bristol will give a guest lecture on “Queer Ecologies of the Coastline”, which you are welcome to attend in person at The Unitobler Campus in room F 021, or watch at a later stage, under Project Output / Guest Lectures.
Ursula Kluwick has invited Prof. Helga Ramsey-Kurz (University of Innsbruck) to give a guest lecture as part of an MA seminar entitled “Why Literature? Aims and Uses of Literature and Literary Studies”.
Her topic will be migration and refugee literature, especially the project ARENA, which she has created to bring together students and refugees in an effort to collaboratively write stories of migration. As the sea-route is still chosen by migrants seeking refuge, littoral spaces feature as frequent and important settings.
The talk will take place on the 27 November 2023, from 4-6pm. Watch this space for announcements regarding the possibility to attend the talk remotely.
Marion Troxler, the newest addition to our team, will be presenting her project as part of the seminar ‘Seas and Shores in Literature and Culture’, which is given by the Haunted Shores Project at Edinburgh Napier University. Her talk will be titled ‘Shifting Shores and Metamorphic Merfolk: Transformability as Resistance in Mermaid and Selkie Literature of the 20th-21st centuries.’
You can find more information on how to join the seminar online or in person on the project website.
As the northern hemisphere is moving into the season of frozen water, PD Dr. Ursula Kluwick will be hosting a Webinar on “The Blue Humanities: Aquatic Materialisations Beyond the Sea.”
If you would like to partake in the discussion on this recent development in the blue humanities, sign up on the EASLCE website.
As part of her seminar “‘System Change, Not Climate change’: The Rise of Cli-Fi.”, Guðrun í Jákupsstovu, and the rest of the project team, are welcoming Dr. Katie Ritson as a guest lecturer. She will be giving a talk surrounding Doggerland, the now sunken area of land between the British Isles and the Scandinavian nations, in literature.
Dr. Huma Yaqub, coming to Bern to work on her SNSF project, that takes a look at select Indian and Swiss Novels through the lense of the blue humanities, gave a guest lecture presenting her insights into some of those texts. The lecture was titled “Between Ebb and Flow Agency of Water, Politics and Environmental Justice.”
The project has invited Prof. Steve Mentz to hold a workshop for MA students about Blue Spaces that are not the ocean. After hearing from the Project’s own researchers, as well as from visiting scholar Dr. Huma Yaqub, about their projects, the students will present the results of the writing task “Tiny Ecologies”, as inspired by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ASLE teaching Ressource, “Tiny Ecology”. https://www.asle.org/teaching_resources/tiny-ecology/
As part of the Lecture Series “On the Waterfront”, the project welcomed Prof. Dr. Steven Mentz as a guest lecturer.
You can now watch his lecture entitled “Oceans, Seas, Islands, Beaches: Toward a Poetics of Scale and Encounter in the Blue Humanities”, by clicking on the picture above, or under Project Output / Guest Lectures.
Ariane de Waal and Ursula Kluwick have co-edited a special issue on “Victorian Materialisms” for the European Journal of English Studies
See their introduction: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2044143 (Open Access until June 2022!)
For new littoral research, see Ann Garascia’s article on archiving oceanic memory in this special issue: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2044153
In conjunction with the English Department at the University of Bern, the project has organised a lecture series on the topic of the Waterfront. Students get literary perspectives of the British waterfront from the medieval and early modern perspective as well as a modern one, as well as an insight into North American Literary representations of it. From a language perspective, the Waterfront is presented to influence sociolinguistics and social semiotics.
December 2021 – SPECIAL ISSUE Ursula Kluwick and Jens Martin Gurr’s co-edited special issue on interdisciplinary literary studies is now online and open access. Not directly beach-related, but with articles about ecocriticism. Open Access at: https://angl.winter-verlag.de/current_issue/ANGL
November 2021 – TEAM CHANGES Fabienne Blaser decided to leave our project team to pursue a different career path.
June 2021 – ARTICLE PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter’s Article “Seaside Resort Blues: The English Seaside in the 1930s.” is now available under https://doi.org/10.30608/HJEAS/2021/27/1/4
05 May 2021 – GUEST LECTURE DR ALEXANDRA CAMPBELL Dr Alexandra Campbell gave a fascinating talk with the title “‘Sacrified to Flow’: Waste, Water and Volumetric Power in Documentary Poetry.” You can now watch this under Project Output / Guest Lectures.
29 April 2021 – GUEST LECTURE PROF. NICHOLAS ALLEN Our project team invited Prof. Nicholas Allen for a guest lecture on Irish coasts, titled: “The Water’s Speech: Literature at the Water’s Edge.” Under Project Output / Guest Lectures, you can find a recording of the lecture.
Spring 2021 – “READING THE BEACH”-WORKSHOP Part two of the workshop series taught by Prof. Virginia Richter.
18 November 2020 – GUEST LECTURE & WORKSHOP PROF. JOHN BRANNIGAN To mark the end of the “Oceanic Studies”-course, we invited Prof. John Brannigan from University College Dublin gave a lecture, titled “Blue Frontiers. The Coastal Imaginary in the Age of Environmental Catastrophe.” More than 80 people came to see him.
Autumn 2020 – OCEANIC STUDIES WORKSHOP Prof. Virginia Richter, our PI teaches a workshop on oceanic studies. All team members, as well as a mix of MA and PhD students attend.
1 August 2020 – KICK OFF Due to lower Covid-numbers the Project Team meets in a Restaurant and has Lunch together. The Project is officially launched!