Dear blog,
So it’s been ages since I last wrote. I’ve been completely sideswiped by the amount of work that I’ve had to do this semester. Even by my standards, it’s been something else and writing the blog was one of the many things that I haven’t managed to do. (As was keeping my email inbox at below 100 messages.) I’m now on leave in Moscow and so have found the time to write this. I’ve also spent 13 hours working here so far, even though this is supposed to be a holiday.
It looks as though Salford University is about to announce more restructuring (a euphemism for more redundancies), at almost the same time as we went through this last year. It’s because of the redundancies last year that I had so much more teaching than usual this semester: I wrote nine new lectures in seven weeks this semester. They were written faster than I would have liked and were on a range of topics at varying distances away from my area of expertise. I have written lectures on Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, etc etc. All of the topics that I gave lectures on were of interest to me (generally I have lectured on poetry this semester and on some of the greatest poems in the English language), and I enjoyed doing the few hours of research that I was able to do for the lectures, but it would have been good to have more time to spend on them.
I’ve also given some research papers, firstly at the University of Sheffield and then at the Medical Matters conference in York, both in March. These were great events, which I enjoyed very much, though they added pressure to an otherwise already stressful term. The Medical Matters conference was excellent. I really enjoyed Mike Brown’s paper, which reassessed the idea that there was a move towards an unfeeling and desensitized surgeon in the early nineteenth century. He used sources such as Astley Cooper’s lectures to trainee surgeons in which he urges them to become men of feeling and to empathise with the patient. This work has really interesting implications for John Keats and the usual accounts of his reasons for leaving the medical profession that I’d like to think about some more. Corinna Wagner’s book, Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture, due out this September (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9781938169083), sounded excellent too and I’m looking forward to reading that. Clark Lawlor spoke about his Leverhulme funded project ‘Fashionable Diseases’ (http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/23907560), which builds on his earlier research interests in consumption and depression to take a wider view on a number of such diseases. Jo Wharton gave a very persuasive paper arguing that Anna Barbauld’s engagement with Joseph Priestley may have begun earlier than has been thought.
Moscow has been fun despite the fact that I’ve worked almost every day I’ve been here. I’m here because my partner’s book, Consuming History (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415399456/), has been translated into Russian and is being published by the New Literary Observer’s book series (http://nlobooks.ru/sites/default/files/old/nlobooks.ru/eng/111/112/index.html). It’s amazing to see what an impact his work has had here; it’s a central text for a new MA programme in Public History, and it’s clear that the subject is a hugely important one for this country. Today we leave Moscow for St Petersburg where I’m hoping that the hotel we’re staying in won’t have wi-fi and I might have four days relaxation. On Wednesday we return to the UK and I go straight to Cardiff for the British Society for Literature and Science conference, which I’m sure will be great.
I’m hoping to keep the blog up now since there are only a few weeks of teaching left and no new lectures to write! Let’s see.
Sharon