Dear Blog,
I urge everyone to see the two brilliant entries in the LitSciMed Film competition: http://litscimedvideocompetition.litscimed.org/film-clips/ or you can watch them on Youtube. Please do watch them and post your comments online.
We’ve had another great round of applications for event 3, with a real variety (again) of PhD topics from students in many different Universities across Britain and the world. Successful students should hear by Tuesday 8th June that they have a place and the reading list is being posted on the website as I write. Paul Craddock has already started off a discussion topic connected to event 3 on the social space – you need to click on ‘Newest’ in the Groups section of the social space and then you can join and comment.
I had a lovely time in Dove Cottage last week, with some real discoveries made on the final few days. It turns out that John Davy was the Wordsworth family doctor and there are lots of letters to and from William Wordsworth concerning the health of their daughter Dora. After Wordsworth’s death, John Davy was indefatigable in efforts to secure funds for the memorials in Grasmere and Ambleside Churches and there were lots of letters about this too. It seems that John Davy lived in Ambleside because his wife’s mother had links there and she settled there too. I need to find out lots more about his mother-in-law, Eliza Fletcher, who was an author in her own right (I need to read her 1875 Autobiography, which is clearly a text already known and studied by eighteenth-century scholars) and she was a close friend to the Wordsworths, Arnolds, and other literary families. I didn’t get through all of the material that the Wordsworth Centre have by these figures, but I guess that just means that I’ll have to go back!
This week has mainly been dominated by exam marking (finished at 6pm last night!) but yesterday I did attend the excellent ‘Periodicals Research’ day organised by two of my colleagues in English at Salford, Peter Buse and Kristin Ewins. There were some really useful workshops where we looked at the artefacts themselves, periodicals ranging from The Idler to The Illustrated London News, Plays and Players and Our Time. We considered how to read illustrations, how to find out about readerships, distribution, how to evaluate content, discover the authors of anonymous articles, and much more, under the expert tutelage of Brian Maidment and Margaret Beetham. Amusingly, the final periodical I looked at, something called Good Words, from 1879, had a serial feature on Humphry Davy, complete with a page of pictures of him and a detailed biography! The day was attended by people from all over the North-west and from many different disciplines; it was great to be the other side of the desk again and be taught lots that I didn’t know.
Finally, we’ve had lots of interest in the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Transmission and Reception of P.B. Shelley in Working-Class Journals’ but there’s still some time before the deadline (25th June). It’s being advertised on jobs.ac.uk and in the The Guardian next Tuesday. If you know anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply!
All best,
Sharon