Dr Catherine R. Evans, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at The John Rylands Research Institute and member of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective, is participating in an online roundtable that is part of the IHR People, Place, and Community series:

Decomposition/Recomposition 

Online  – 20^th June 5:30 – 7:30 

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/decomposition-recomposition-muddy-oozy-spaces-estuary-fen-sea-floor-and-tideline 

This roundtable will turn to the muddy, oozy spaces of estuary, fen, sea floor, and tideline. Work on the Blue Humanities has often prioritised wide oceans, but more recently Lowell Duckert (2017) and John Brannigan (2014) have focused attention on the places where land and sea combine. These environments are at times unappealing and inhospitable to human life, shifting and protean, characterised by their mixed nature. This roundtable discussion will see four new and emerging literary scholars, working from the medieval to modern, examine these spaces of decomposition and consider the materials that they have provided for literary (re)making, including in our own creative practices. We ask: 

• How do tidal landscapes engage writers with, and across, time?   
• What can Premodern Studies learn from contemporary ecocriticism, particularly the Blue Humanities, and vice versa?   
• How do spaces of decomposition complicate the division between the human and the natural?   
• How are our critical impulses shaped by our creative desires, and how might we undertake creative research alongside critical research?   

Please register here.

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