Dear blog,

So, it seems that I haven’t written a blog post since last August, when I was in Philadelphia at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Now I’m in Canberra on an Australian National University Fellowship for six weeks and thought I should check in. The Davy Letters edition has gone in! It went in at the beginning of April, four months after the end of 2017 deadline, but for a project that has lasted ten years, that doesn’t seem too bad to me. It was huge in the end – the submitted manuscript was over 4000 pages long. We’re hoping to get a discount flyer soon and to find out how much OUP will charge for such a monster.

I’ve started over the last few months to think about my next project. I always wanted to digitise Davy’s notebooks, which are held at the Royal Institution, and this was my original plan before the executor of June Fullmer’s will showed us her 1960’s collection of letters (and the rest is history). I’m also very excited about the idea of crowdsourcing transcriptions of the notebooks. The Zooniverse is doing some excellent work in this area and they seem keen to be involved. The idea is for a small, pilot project first of three notebooks with an eye to a larger project (all of the c. 70 notebooks?) if this is funded and all goes to plan. It’s exciting to be thinking of something new plus I really have enjoyed editing so I’d like to do some more of that.

I’m also here in Canberra because I’m giving a plenary at the Frankenstein conference to be held here in mid September. I’ve started work on the paper and was pleased to read the book again and find that there was more that I might say about it. I’m about to start writing up my notes and ideas and then need to start trying to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of the primary and critical texts.

It’s great to have some time to myself and to do my research. I’m very aware of how precious this is and intend to make the most of it.

Sx