Abstract and bios

“Humanities in Motion”, Johan Östling (chair), Ragni Svensson, David Larsson Heidenblad

Abstract:
In the course of the 2010s, the history of the humanities has experienced an intellectual renaissance as a scholarly field. In the new research that has emerged, the history of the humanities has been written in new ways, for instance by focusing on practices and personae of the humanists, by analyzing the relationship between the humanities and other fields of academic knowledge and by putting the humanities in a global perspective.

In our panel, we will build on those studies but shift the attention to the humanities in the public sphere of the postwar period. With inspiration from the history of knowledge and other adjacent fields, we will discuss how the circulation of humanistic knowledge in society can be understood and investigated. An analytical concept that we want to introduce is "public arenas of knowledge". We understand this as certain platforms that enabled knowledge actors to meet their audiences and thereby enabled circulation of knowledge to occur. At the center of our empirical investigations stands the postwar society of Sweden, in particular the 1960s and 1970s.

Bios:
Johan Östling is Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University. He is the Director for the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). Östling’s research encompasses various aspects of modern European history, in particular the history of knowledge, intellectual history, the history of the humanities and the history of the university. In an ongoing project, he investigates how knowledge circulated in postwar Sweden and West Germany. His recent publications include Humboldt and the Modern German University (2018), Circulation of Knowledge (2018), Forms of Knowledge (2020) and Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia.

Ragni Svensson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), at the Department of History, Lund University, and teaches Publishing Studies at Stockholm University. Her research concerns the public circulation of humanistic knowledge in postwar Sweden, from a Book History perspective. Svensson’s thesis from 2018, Cavefors. Förlagsprofil och mediala mytbilder i det svenska litteratursamhället 1959–1982 (Cavefors. Publisher profile and mythical media images in the Swedish literary sphere 1959-1982) has been awarded with the Clio Prize for young Swedish historians. Recent publications include the article “Revolting against the established book market. Book cafes as key actors within the counterpublic of the Scandinavian New Left”. 

David Larsson Heidenblad is Associate Professor and a Deputy Director for the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK) at the Department of History, Lund University (https://newhistoryofknowledge.com/). He takes a general interest in the post-war period, especially the societal reach and relevance of various forms of knowledge, including environmental, financial, and humanist knowledge. He has written extensively on the emergence of environmentalism in Scandinavia around 1970 and co-edited Circulation of Knowledge (Nordic Academic Press, 2018), Forms of Knowledge, (Nordic Academic Press, 2020) and Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia (Routledge). His latest monograph The Environmental Turn in Postwar Sweden: A new history of knowledge is published with Lund University Press.

“Science Fiction as a Futural Public Sphere”, Michael Godhe (Linköping University)

Abstract:
In the paper I discuss and analyze public culture through the lens of the science-fiction genre, and develop and elaborate a theoretical perspective explaining how science fiction ‘texts’ (literature and film) function as a medial arena for public discourses on the role of science and technology in society. In this perspective, science fiction ‘texts’ are seen as forms of mediated communication opening up different kinds of futural public spheres depending on the subject discussed, for example globalization, the war on terror post 9/11, environmental issues or artificial intelligence. These public spheres can, in their turn, be conceptualized as public or circulation cultures, since the science fiction ‘texts’ are enabling a broader public discourse about the societal impacts of science and technology. Within this public culture questions on the importance of science and technology in our society, and the possible future impacts in terms of ethical and moral dilemmas are raised, discussed, debated and contested. In this sense, the science fiction genre is part of a transmedial public discourse on science, technology, culture and society, and also part of the changing media landscapes where various new social media forms play a vital part in renewing issues of public engagement and forming public opinions.

Bio:
Michael Godhe is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Society, Campus Norrköping, Linköping University, Sweden. His research concerns Critical Future Studies with an emphasis on science fiction, see ”Beyond Capitalist Realism – Why We Need Critical Future Studies” (co-written with Luke Goode), Culture Unbound, 2017:1 (9), and the theme issue of Culture Unbound, 2018:2 (10) on Critical Future Studies (co-edited with Luke Goode).
 

“The Humanities and Future Narratives of the Welfare State: Shifting Regimes of Legitimacy”

Abstract:
It is frequently claimed that the humanities – and universities in general – are facing a legitimacy crisis, on the national as well as the global stage, as their roles in society are being questioned. But what do such claims of crisis actually mean? And what do they do? I claim that notions of crisis require a comparative dimension, for instance by identifying a normative state in the past, e.g., “a golden age”, that the present is contrasted with. Temporal aspects are indeed crucial to take into account in order to understand the shifting legitimacy of knowledge in society. 

In this paper, I wish to historicize current debates on the state of the humanities by displaying how specific branches of knowledge were incorporated into legitimizing narratives, and also how subsequent regimes of legitimacy characterized the modern politics of knowledge. In particular, I will focus on the welfare state of 20th-century Sweden that saw the formation of a particular legitimacy regime based on rational planning and an egalitarian ethos from the interwar period to the early postwar years. The humanities seemed less compatible with the ideals of this regime and were clearly struggling to get incorporated into the legitimizing, future narratives of the welfare state. This history of shifting regimes of legitimacy, coproduced by knowledge and politics, is imperative to take into account in order to better grasp the mechanisms that condition the impact and public value of knowledge at certain points in time.

Bio:
Hampus Östh Gustafsson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University. In 2021, he defended his doctoral thesis on the legitimacy of the 20-century humanities in Swedish politics of knowledge. In a new research project, he investigates the shifting state of collegiality in the context of major reforms in the history of research and higher education. Recent publications include articles in History of Humanities, History of Education Review, and Lychnos.

“Cultural Heritage discourses between environment, materiality, politics and collective perceptions”, Diego Calaon, Elena Grandi, Shaul Bassi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Abstract:
Is Venice sinking? Yes, it is. The natural subsidence of the Adriatic coastal soils and the significant eustatism are a matter of fact. Nevertheless, over time we have failed to raise the city up. Nowadays, we are experiencing an increasing impact of high sea levels, and places like Venice become emblems of our capacity (or incapacity) to cope with global climate changes. Who is to blame? The Humanities can help us to understand better how much our perception of the complex interactions between humans, the environment, and the narratives around the landscape transformations play a critical role in taking action or defining urban or cultural policies.

Adopting an archaeological and anthropological perspective it is evident that in the past Venetians had a completely different approach to the high tide’s problematics: the soil was naturally sinking, therefore, the urban fabric was adapting the walking levels generation by generation. 
Venice, among other things, was a city of innovation. Its ability to reinvent itself made Venice last for centuries. Today the distinct Venetian urban heritage is perceived and managed with an entirely different framework: an extraordinary relic of the past that needs to be safeguarded “as it is” for the sake of memory and identity. The world wants Venice saved, so we preserve every single stone, aiming to preserve its material authenticity. “Save Venice” risks to become a Venice ontology: the preservation and the perception of it may paradoxical contribute to the loss of the city and the Venetians. We will consider how thinking about Venice through its material and cultural history may prevent Venice from sinking, and also suggest possible solutions to other coastal areas.

Bios:
Diego Calaon, landscape archaeologist, is a researcher at Ca’ Foscari, and former Marie Curie Fellow. He is investigating Venice adopting a comprehensive anthropological and environmental approach, fostering new methods for re-interpret its origins and examining how ancient and present societies deal with a very specific watery material world. 

Elena Grandi, PhD, archaeologist and historian by training, her research has focused on the material culture of the first settlement of Venice, and the settlement dynamics in the Po Plain with an interdisciplinary approach. Currently she is working as European Project Advisor and research facilitator at Ca’ Foscari University supporting the design of project proposals related to Cultural Heritage. 

Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and director of the International Center for Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he coordinates the new Master degree in Environmental Humanities. His research and publications are divided between Shakespeare, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities.

Academic Values versus Impact and Outreach Policies”, Tabea Hochstrasser (KU Leuven)

Abstract: 
This paper considers the merits and challenges of science communication as defined by Flemish academic historians and compares them to regulations expressed in policy documents on impact and outreach by the humanities. Testimonials of academic researchers on their engagement with news media – printed and digital newspapers, radio, television, and associated online platforms – serve as a basis for this study. It draws on interviews conducted with historians from four major Flemish universities (Universiteit Gent, KU Leuven, Universiteit Antwerpen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Interviewees are from different generations, gender, specialisations and positions but are all employed as academic historians. They have varying levels of experience in research and science communication: the range of participants includes both senior researchers appearing on major news outlets and junior researchers who have little to no media experience.

At its core this paper looks into how Flemish academic historians think of their professional occupation. This includes both what they consider to be their specialist, professional skill set and range of tasks, as well as their views on the nature of their subject and general craft of history. Crucially, participants’ answers on how they perceive the growing demand of policy-makers to create impact or outreach are included. This allows for a comparison of their professional attitudes with contemporary policy trends. To what extent do they align? Or are they at cross-purposes?

Bio:
Tabea Hochstrasser obtained a Master degree in history at KU Leuven in 2018. She is a post-graduate student in science communication and education, as well as part-time teaching assistant at the Research Unit of History and study advisor for Art History at the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts (Belgium). Her research interests are early modern popular culture, the theory of the history of ideas and the past and present relationship between historical science and society.

“The traditional scholarly virtues in today’s Humanities”, Marianne Thormählen (Lund University)

Abstract:
‘Based on painstaking archival research’, ‘meticulous scholarship’, ‘profoundly learned’ – to academics of my generation, trained by teachers and supervisors who were in their turn rooted in early and mid-twentieth-century scholarly standards, those are expressions of the highest praise. By contrast, a work or a person dismissed as ‘unscholarly’ was dismissed outright. 

By and large, I think it’s fair to say that present-day Humanities research no longer emphasises the traditional scholarly virtues. There is pressure on Humanities scholars to demonstrate ‘relevance’ and document ‘impact’; and questions as to what a researcher owes to his or her predecessors in the field are no longer foregrounded in the way they used to be, at least in that Germanic academic world in which Swedish academe originated. 

Of course, the contrast between what the Germans call a ‘Kammergelehrter’ and a free spirit in lively dialogue with the world around has been with us for centuries. Even so, there used to be a fundamental requirement of erudition in a Humanities scholar that is no longer there, a requirement which was tied to the obligation to be – a word now always attended by demurs – objective.

But that’s not the whole story. In my experience, the top positions and prizes in Humanities research are still to a high degree attained on the basis of ‘painstaking archival research’, ‘meticulous scholarship’ and ‘profound learning’; it’s just that methods, concepts and emphases have changed. I hope to be able to bring out some aspects of that shift.

Bio:
Marianne Thormählen is Professor Emerita of English Literature at Lund University. Still active as a scholar, she has published books and articles on Modernism, especially T. S. Eliot; the Restoration poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; and the Brontë sisters. Her best-known book is The Brontës and Religion, published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. She has supervised 17 doctoral students through to the doctorate.

She was Dean of Research in the Humanities and Theology, Lund University, from 2009 up to and including 2014. In that role, she was in charge of the Joint Faculties’ research evaluation HTRQ14, which may be read online at www.ht.lu.se/books. 

Since 2016, Marianne Thormählen has managed the new Lund University Press, an English-only publisher which brings out top-class Lund research in collaboration with Manchester University Press (http://lunduniversitypress.lu.se). Lund University Press books are published simultaneously in print and Open Access via the OAPEN platform.

“Why are the humanities not leading the way in open scholarship?”, Demmy Verbeke (KU Leuven)

Abstract:
In many ways, the humanities are, to use the word of Micah Vandegrift, "weird". Scholarly communication within the humanities is no exception. The limited market share of commercial players in academic publishing for the humanities is worth noting, just as the availability of community-owned infrastructures (such as Humanities Commons) and the repeated claims that outreach and societal impact are crucial and obvious for humanities disciplines. This presents us with both a unique opportunity and the obligation to come up with an ecosystem for scholarly communication for the humanities which is characterized by a fundamental openness to society at large. However: enthusiasm for and uptake of not-for-profit and radically open approaches to scholarly communication seem limited. What is more, fears have been voiced that things might take a turn for the worst if the current mainstream approach to implement Open Access would be applied to humanities disciplines. 

Why are the humanities not leading the way in open scholarship? What could we do to make this happen? And how do we prevent that the for-profit approach to Open Access, which threatens true open scholarship and community-driven solutions for scholarly communciation, takes over in the humanities?

Bio:
Demmy Verbeke received his PhD in Classics from KU Leuven in 2005. As Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes, Verbeke is responsible for collections and services for the Arts and Humanities. As a member of the management team with primary responsibilities for research, he also contributes to the strategic development and operational management of KU Leuven Libraries as a whole. He combines this position in the library with an appointment as associate professor of open scholarship at the Faculty of Arts. His research and teaching primarily focus on non-profit and community-driven forms of scholarly communication in the humanities.

”Ladies and Gentlemen… Welcome to the CIRCUS! Interdisciplinarity at Uppsala University”
Ingrid Berg, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson (CIRCUS, Uppsala University)

Abstract:
Is it possible to foster fruitful new transgressive research collaborations whilst not hosting the collaborating researchers? Is it possible to explore and foster a multitude of differently organised cross-disciplinary endeavours within the humanities and social sciences? If endeavours along such lines indeed are possible, what do the challenges and fruitful pathways look like?

Since 2017, Uppsala University has funded interdisciplinary research initiatives within the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Circus emerged out of this initiative and is since January 2019 a staffed centre within Uppsala University working to become a platform where scholars in the Humanities can network with other faculties and seek funding for interdisciplinary projects. 

We will in this short presentation share our reflections on how we at Circus work with the above questions with a focus on what this can mean for the Humanities. In doing this we are also exploring another role for Circus, namely how Circus can be an arena where the hopes and fears attached to different forms of interdisciplinary endeavours can be debated, promoted and critiqued. 

Bios:
Claes-Fredrik Helgesson is the research director of CIRCUS. Helgesson has a PhD in business studies from the Stockholm School of Economics. He has worked in the fields of economic sociology and science and technology studies (STS), in recent years with a focus on valuation as a social practice. Before Circus, Helgesson was a professor at Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change (Tema T) at Linköping University. 

Ingrid Berg is the project coordinator at CIRCUS. She has a PhD in Archaeology and a background at the cross-disciplinary Research School for Studies in Cultural History (FoKult) at Stockholm University. Her research interests include the history of archaeological practice, gender and equality issues in academia, and critical heritage studies.
 

”The Third l: No dictionary entries found. Progress Report of the Erasmus+ SSH Doctoral Training
Consortium GRADUATE SPIRIT”, Ortwin de Graef (KU Leuven)

Abstract:
The subtitle of this presentation is what the online Oxford English Dictionary delivers when you search for the term “intersectoral” or “intersectorality”. Google, on the other hand, yields plenty of hits, starting with the World Health Organization where intersectoral actions are identified as “actions affecting health outcomes undertaken by sectors outside the health sector, possibly, but not necessarily, in collaboration with the health sector.” Further down “intersectorality” is sometimes used as a near-synonym of interdisciplinarity, but when you scroll into the wonderful world of EuroSpeak, the term takes on the meaning it has in the Salzburg Principles for Doctoral Education: mobility between the academic sector and other sectors. More specifically, intersectorality here singles out the third component, next to interdisciplinarity and internationalisation, of so-called triple-I doctoral training. 
Graduate Spirit (https://www.gradspirit.eu/) is an Erasmus+ consortium (2017-2020) of nine graduate schools dedicated to finding, designing, testing and promoting best practices for triple-I doctoral training in SSH. Over the past years, we have studied the doctoral training landscape in Europe and beyond in search of inspiring examples. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, innovative best practices for the third I have proved harder to identify than initiatives facilitating the other two. In this presentation we document some of our findings and offer tentative recommendations for doctoral training in the humanities broadly conceived.

Bio:
Ortwin de Graef, professor of English Literature, is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot over Isaac Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza, David Grossman, Alan Warner and A.L. Kennedy. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary.

“Public English: Three responses to reciprocity between literature and policy”, Zoe Hope Bulaitis (University of Birmingham)

Abstract:
The demand for contemporary research into the value of humanities in public life is clear (Belfiore & Upchurch 2013; Brouillette 2014; Rylance 2016; Bulaitis 2020). Within this, a discussion of what public life is and who represents it is equally crucial (Wilson 2019). Admittedly, an economic demand for justification for the ‘value’ of arts and humanities subjects can be seen as a push factor, driving adaptation as a means of survival in the practices of scholarship. This is not only affecting research impact; within the UK, the past year alone has seen a rapid increase in undergraduate courses across the humanities offering applied/engaged modules focused on exploring future employment and practice-based learning (e.g. ‘The Public Role of the Humanities’ Bristol; ‘Public English’ Birmingham; ‘BA Humanities’ UCD; ‘Introduction To Public Humanities’ Limerick). In this paper, I argue that the burgeoning fields of the economic humanities and the public humanities are not only indicative of defeat or complicity in practices of marketisation in the university. I explore how the methods of doing English in public reveal benefits in co-creative project and partnership work and open up new possibilities for reciprocal relationships in knowledge creation. The paper maps out interactions between academic research and teaching with policy. Part academic-talk, part auto-ethnography, I discuss three models of reciprocal relations in my experience of working in the field that has come to be called ‘Public English’:
 
The Analyst – exploring what happens when literature reads policy as text. 
The Consultant – unpacking new working cultures, and what happens when literary research can be hired. 
The Co-ordinator – reflecting on how literature and policy can be brought into pedagogical contexts. 
I hope to establish a sense of pragmatic reciprocity and open up the discussion of the values of public humanities research in navigating both tensions and opportunities in the 21st-century academy.  

Bio:
Zoe Hope Bulaitis is an educator and researcher who is motivated by better articulating the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. She is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her open access monograph, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (2020), explores the relationship between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century economics, literature, and higher education policy. Zoe is currently writing a handbook on Public English (Routledge, 2022). She is currently also co-editor of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings and a member of the Executive Committee for the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). Tweet her @zoebulaitis.
 

“Intersecting Crises: The Role of the Humanities Amid Crises of Pandemic, Migration and Climate Change”

Chair Bharti Arora (IASH, University of Edinburgh)

Panel abstract:
This panel seeks to explore possible new role(s) for the humanities in the face of ever-multiplying crises. Henry Giroux’ concept of a critical pedagogy of hope frames the debate, where he asserts, “hope and critical consciousness are dialectically reanimating and together they produce ‘the shock’ of new knowledge and new social and cultural configurations and possibilities for human transformation”. Through the lens of literature from the mediaeval era to the modern day, papers will explore how the humanities can strive towards transformative action by centring empathy, presence and the human amid calamity. This panel is presented by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.

Individual abstracts:

“The Humanities and the Enormity of Crisis” 

Joanna Wilson-Scott (IASH, University of Edinburgh)

Thinking particularly about the climate emergency and pandemics as methods of exploring and articulating crisis, this proposed presentation considers the potential for the humanities to deal with calamity, as well as their role in addressing challenges and change. The work theorises that the enormity of crisis sometimes inhibits comprehension, positioning  impending catastrophe on a scale hard to conceive. While bleak and alarming, scientific prognostications can render crises abstract and distant. Through the humanities, there is the potential for climate change, pandemics, and other developing emergencies to become more relatable and to resonate more powerfully with the public rather than just with policy-makers and practitioners. 
In his work on the Anthropocene, Adam Trexler argues that the epoch humanity has created involves a “cultural transformation” (2015: 5), not simply a geographic, atmospheric, or environmental one. The same can be said about other manifestations of crisis, such as endemics or pandemics, ones in which humans have a part to play in the development or mitigation of calamity. Anthropologist Gísli Pálsson states that what we consider to be “environmental is also social” (2015: 179), and the humanities offer us the opportunity to explore from an interdisciplinary position the connection between the two, while retaining a focus on the human experience.  

By way of example, fictional representations of the domestic effects of climate change help to bring the Anthropocene more sharply into focus. I have argued elsewhere that the home is a site of ecological significance, and that the domestic effects of climate change challenge apathy and crisis denial. This line of thinking can be extended to calamity more broadly, and this paper hopes to invite discussion on the ways in which the humanities can address, respond, and adapt to crisis by shifting focus onto the familiar and proximal, and to consider the potential practical applications.  
 

 “Beyond ‘Crisis’: Why Literature Matters in Approaching the Marginalization of Migrant Workers in the Gulf States”

Nadeen Dakkak
COVID-19 exacerbated the challenges facing migrants and displaced people all over the world. In most of the Arab Gulf States, the large number of migrants and the threat of what is typically referred to in official discourses as the demographic imbalance between the citizen minority and the non-citizen majority immediately became entwined with fear of the pandemic’s threat on the citizenry’s health and the economy. This fear predictably intensified institutional and social marginalization, but the pandemic also put many low-paid workers in desperate conditions, causing a noticeable increase in suicide rates. At the heart of all this is how their lives tend to be perceived and treated as dispensable once their labor is no longer needed, or when they are seen as an economic and social burden at a time of crisis. Indeed, as in other contexts where depictions of migration as a “crisis” contribute to justifying exclusion, the dispensability of migrant bodies in the Gulf became more legitimate during the pandemic, which in turn created another “crisis” at a humanitarian level.  

This paper questions the notion of “crisis” when used to understand either the increasing threat of a large migrant population, or increasing conditions of dehumanization, not only because these conditions are an extension of existing marginalization, but also because understanding migrants as numbers or through the lens of a humanitarian “crisis” risks obscuring individual experiences and contributing to their dehumanization. I argue that literature is an invaluable sphere through which migrant voices and everyday practices can be recognized as an affirmation of their presence and as forms of knowledge. In particular, I draw on migration narratives from Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary people alongside reflections from my experience of incorporating fiction in designing learning materials on migration. My aim is to demonstrate the role of reading, researching and teaching literature in building the social and cultural awareness that is essential for political and social change.

“Solace in the Humanities: On the Digital (Re)-Framing of Pestilence”

Lucy Hinnie (IASH, University of Edinburgh)
From January 2019 to January 2021, I worked on a digital edition of part of the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript. The manuscript was compiled by 23 year old George Bannatyne, a young Edinburgh gentlemen, ‘in tyme of pest’: it is not a collection of original verse, but rather a miscellany containing the largest extant collection of Older Scots verse, curated and categorised by Bannatyne, ‘compelled to rest’ during a outbreak of plague in Edinburgh. Having undertaken the majority of my transcription work during the initial lockdown of 2020, the parallels of my own process and that of Bannatyne are abundantly clear.

The methodology of my digitisation mirrored Bannatyne’s analogue scribal process, and offered a unique insight into the roots of an empathy-based research praxis. Bannatyne’s search for comfort through poetry became ever more understandable, as he turns to the ancient poets for solace, testament to the ways in which a time of unrest forces us to self-examine in relation to that which has gone before. The need for control in uncertain times could find no better outlet, perhaps, than the reproduction of established and enjoyed verse.

Considering the potential of digitised texts to open up scholarship in times of inaccessibility, this paper examines the intersection of late medieval archival practice and modern digitisation. It will look at the ways in which the infrastructure of literary study and appreciation allows us to navigate times of enormous strife, and to act as an artefact reflecting the experience of trauma. By looking at the practice of curation and collation, and its development into digital practice, I aim to draw parallels between the historic experience of plague and the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to proposing a research framework bounded in empathy and reflective practice.


Bios:
Dr Bharti Arora teaches at the Department of English, Tagore Government Arts and Science College, Pondicherry University. She has earned her Ph.D. (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and Society and Culture in South Asia.  She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019). 

Dr Nadeen Dakkak will be joining the University of Edinburgh in October 2021 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World. She has a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick where she also was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in 2020-2021. Her doctoral research examined how migration to the Arab Gulf States is represented in Arabic fiction, but her research interests and publications cover literature from/about the Gulf in English and in translation as well as literature and popular culture on migration and diaspora more generally.  

Dr Lucy R. Hinnie (she/her) completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. From 2019-21, she lived and worked on Treaty Six Territory and the Métis homeland at the University of Saskatchewan, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern literature, Older Scots poetry, medieval feminist criticism and the digital humanities. She is an enthusiastic advocate for open knowledge and the use of Wiki platforms in academia. Her doctoral research focussed on the medieval querelle des femmes and the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript, while her postdoctoral project delivered a digital edition of the fourth section of the Bannatyne. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, a member of the TEI By Example International Advisory Committee, and from 2021-22, the Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library.

Dr Joanna Wilson-Scott is a literary scholar with research interests in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. She has a background in both social anthropology and comparative literature, and obtained her PhD with scholarship from the University of Leicester in 2018. Recent publications include articles in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. In 2019, Joanna was a postdoctoral visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford, where she looked at the domestic effects of the Anthropocene in fiction. She is the Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow at the IASH at the University of Edinburgh for the 2021-2022 academic year, researching perforated landscapes and western extractivist practices in anglophone literatures.