Works in Progress

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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?