Early Career International Research Fellowship 2015
Mary Fairclough
‘Electrical Tropes in Literary and Political Texts’
As part of its international research collaboration, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions funds outstanding international scholars in the field to visit one or more of the Australian nodes for a period of between four weeks and two months, to work with members of the Centre on a research program of their choice. Visitors are invited to present their work in lectures or symposia, where they will receive feedback from and engage in discussion with members of the Centre, promoting collaborative research. Mary Fairclough held an Early Career International Research Fellowship in 2015 and travelled to Australia to work with the Centre for a period of seven weeks. Mary is based in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York and was previously a member of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Huddersfield. She completed an MA and PhD at the University of York. Her research interests lie in the intersection between literature, politics and science in the long eighteenth century and she published her first monograph, The Romantic Crowd, with Cambridge University Press in 2013. Her current project explores the ways in which the discourse of electrical science was appropriated in literary and political texts and she is preparing another monograph, titled Electrick Communication Every Where. Mary comments on her time as an Early Career Research Fellow with CHE, below.
In the spring of 2015 I had the privilege of undertaking a CHE visiting fellowship at The University of Adelaide. I was based in Adelaide from 20 January to 30 March 2015 and made a very useful and enjoyable visit to the CHE node at The University of Western Australia (UWA) from 1–8 March. My research investigates the connections between emotions and political communication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the representation of such communication in literary works. In my first book, The Romantic Crowd (Cambridge University Press, 2013), I explored how theories of sympathy and sympathetic communication had taken on new political resonance in the aftermath of revolution in France and campaigns for reform in Britain, 1790–1830. During my time in Adelaide I conducted research for my second monograph, a project arising out of the first as I became increasingly interested in the ways in which communication of many kinds was described in terms of electrical language. During my fellowship I researched and wrote a chapter of this new book, Electrick Communication Every Where (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). It focuses on the work of Dr James Graham, a notorious London showman and quack in the 1770s and 1780s, who claimed that electricity had salutary effects for both the conception of children and sexual pleasure and charged patients £50 a night for the use of his celestial bed, which ‘combined aethereal, magnetic, musical and other irresistibly animating and invigorating influences with the electrical fire’. I found that Graham’s scandalous practice had important implications for a later generation of poets, who made electricity a catalyst for sexual feeling but also for political enthusiasm. While exploring this new material, the support and guidance of Professor David Lemmings, Dr Heather Kerr and other colleagues in Adelaide was invaluable. David Lemmings’ new project on emotions in the eighteenth-‐century courtroom dovetailed in particularly interesting fashion with my work on sympathy in public life. During the fellowship I presented my work on sympathy to colleagues and students in a session titled ‘The Romantic Crowd: Collective Emotion at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, on 11 March 2015, and at the end of my time in Adelaide I gave an account of my new work in a session on James Graham and the poet Mary Robinson. My week at UWA, hosted by Professor Bob White and his colleagues, proved equally useful and informative. During my time in Perth it was a pleasure to meet more CHE colleagues and to find out more about the work of the Centre. I gave two presentations while at UWA: the first a work-‐in-‐progress seminar for the Discipline of English and Cultural Studies on 3 March 2015, titled ‘Electricity, Feeling and Eroticism: Mary Robinson and the Electric Bed’, and the second a public lecture on 5 March titled ‘Adam Walker, Electrical Itinerant: Science, Showmanship and Sedition, 1760–1820’. At both of these events, it was great to receive feedback and comments from CHE and English literature colleagues, and from members of the public. These short papers all fed into the content of my monograph Electrick Communication Every Where, so it was really important to road-‐test these ideas at an early stage, and before different audiences. My fellowship at CHE was of enormous benefit to my work. It was a privilege to have time and opportunity to reflect on the crossover between my work on sympathy and the
field of the history of the emotions with experts in that field, as well as the time and resources to pursue work on my new project. Since completing the fellowship I have discussed my research on Graham on the BBC Radio Scotland program Mad Science, on 24 June 2015, and completed my work on the monograph on electricity. I’m also pleased to say that my home institution, the University of York in the UK, has strengthened its connections with CHE. The interdisciplinary centres for Medieval Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and Eighteenth Century Studies at York now have partnership status with CHE and we are jointly organising an international conference, ‘Powerful Emotions/Emotions and Power, c.400–1850’, to be held at the University of York in June 2017. I look forward to developing many of the important relationships that I formed during my time in Adelaide as part of this ongoing partnership.
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