Works in Progress
I am currently working on two
book projects as part of my SSHRC-funded research agenda:
1. A monograph on “Media
Change, Cultural Memory and the British Nation, 1688-1765.” This project brings together Book
History, Cultural Memory Studies and what I am calling the New New British
Studies in an effort to trace the way in which Britain came to understand
itself as a product of collective memory in the first half of the eighteenth
century. The period between 1688 and
1765 can be seen as a time of great media flux as the print marketplace was burgeoning
but a sense of a media ecology (in terms of difference between oral, manuscript
and print) had yet to be defined. The first four chapters of the book examine
the (so-called) Glorious Revolution, the Darien Disaster, the 1707 Act of Union
and the 1745-46 Jacobite Uprising as media events. In my final chapter, I investigate the
rise of the category of literature as an indicator of national cultural memory:
how in particular did literature come to represent and to create a sense of
collective memory?
2. Diasporic
Romanticisms: This book asks the question of what Romanticism looks like
when filtered through the lens of diasporic identity of the British colonies in
the nineteenth century. How did colonies
such as the Canadas and India both create and challenge the traditions of
Romantic literature?