English Literature
Research Division

• The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project: Led by Dr Mark Nixon, Director of the Beckett International Foundation, this project aims to present, in facsimile and transcription, all of Beckett's original handwritten manuscripts held in collections around the world in an accessible electronic format with accompanying print analyses.
• Creative fellowships: In November 2019, excerpts from a new play and an experimental music composition inspired by the life and work of Samuel Beckett were performed for the first time following two year-long creative fellowships at the University of Reading. Writer and editor Robert McCrum and composer Tim Parkinson produced the works after being given unrivalled access to our Beckett Collection, including audio recordings of Beckett from the mid-20th century. Award-winning author Eimear McBride was the first Becket Creative Fellow in 2017. She produced original performance and prose pieces and kept a blog of her experiences of working in the Collection. Two new creative fellows start their tenure at the Beckett Centre in 2021: video artist Duncan Campbell and playwright Hannah Khalil.

Digitising Elizabethan poetry anthologies: Professor Michelle O'Callaghan has digitised Elizabethan poetry miscellanies or anthologies, bringing them together to make them available via an online database. This is housed on a website providing contextual information on the printers, publishers, editors and authors involved in the composition of the Elizabethan poetry miscellanies. The project also allows users to replicate the early modern practice of ‘commonplacing’ in which extracts are selected from texts and compiled into a personal miscellany or commonplace book. She has created a ‘commonplacer’ software tool that allows users to cut and paste text into a virtual workspace.

When we talk about home: testimonies, oral histories, and poetry of migration: Dr Yasmine Shamma’s project reads interviews with refugees and displaced subjects of recent migration crises against poetry that addresses such human movement. Featuring theoretically informed commentary on a self-curated collection of interviews with refugees from Syria, Palestine, and Africa, the project is part of her Leverhulme Research Fellowship and asks what ‘home’ means to these ‘placeless people’ who left their homes assuming their displacement would be temporary. How do the displaced make themselves at ‘home’ in supposedly temporary settings? How do they sense lost homes when they create new homes?  This project features original interview material and reads it alongside the contemporary poetry of migration.

Lost And Found?: A digital archive of testimonies of migration, displacement, and resettlement: This project, led by Dr Yasmine Shamma, and funded by the British Academy's ‘Tackling the UKs International Challenges’ scheme, centres on the homes that have been lost and found by refugees of the recent Syrian crisis. Experiences of urban life are negotiated in particularly complex ways by refugees moving across regions and nations in pursuit of home. In these movements, they expand the dimensions of home. How do these mobile dimensions constitute programs of making and remaking home, while also underscoring testimonies of migration, displacement, and resettlement?

Incorporating a digital archive, an international conference, and a resulting edited collection of essays, this research will situate the contemporary refugee's pursuit as part of a larger 20th century project of post-camp migration and re-settlement. The digital archive will represent different disciplinary approaches, revisiting archived materials while hosting new materials. As this project's main focus, the archive will enhance international understanding of the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis while encouraging policy makers to rethink policy reform, within the UK and beyond.

African writers series: Dr Sue Walsh is working with Heinemann Educational Books’ publishers’ archive on the African Writers Series held in Special Collections at Reading. This series was particularly significant for the development of postcolonial literature in Africa and when it was first established in 1962, Nigerian authors were amongst its most significant contributors, many being from the south-east (including Chinua Achebe who became its editorial advisor for the first ten years of its existence); but in 1967 civil war broke out when the south-eastern part of Nigeria (under the new name of Biafra) attempted to secede from the rest of the country. Dr Walsh is investigating the archives to see how the African Writers Series, being the product of a British publishing house with a significant number of authors originating from the secessionist territory might be viewed both as an enclave of literary resistance to Biafran marginalisation and also as a potential site for censorship of Biafran perspectives.

Modernist Archives Publishing Project: Dr Nicola Wilson’s research focuses on 20th century print culture and literary history. She is part of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) - a critical digital archive of early twentieth-century publishing history which displays, curates, and describes the documents that go into the making of a book. The digital archive contains thousands of images from the archive of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which is held within the University of Reading’s Special Collections

Altered bodies: Dr Alanna Skuse’s Wellcome Trust-funded literary research looks at how people in early modern England perceived altered bodies - for example by the surgeon’s knife, disease or self wounding. It explores how early modern attitudes to altered bodies influences those of later ages, including today. Her first book looked at how cancer was conceived of, diagnosed and treated in the early modern period c.1580-1720 her second book ‘Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England’ explores surgery and disability in the seventeenth century, asking what happened to people who underwent life-altering operations such as amputation, castration, and mastectomy. Read a recent article stemming from her book, ‘This 400-year-old botched nose job shows how little our feelings about transplants have changed’. 

What children’s literature says about us: Members of our Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, and Media (CIRCL) explore theoretical ideas of how we treat and define childhood. The interdisciplinary research of CIRCL’s Director, Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, aims to deconstruct cultural and social preconceptions, for example exploring ideas of childhood relating to psychology, sociology, philosophy and anthropology. 

Ayn Rand from the left: Ayn Rand’s books have been made into films, topped bestseller lists and admired by capitalists from Reagan to Trump, but left-leaning thinkers have generally failed to take her seriously. In November 2018, Dr Neil Cocks organised the first ever conference examining her work from a left-wing perspective. The conference included group discussions and lectures by academics with an interest in Rand, taking her seriously, even as it resists her ideas, and asking what study of Rand might contribute to wider contemporary debates within literature theory and philosophy.

Diasporic Literary Archives: This project brings together a variety of organisations, scholars, and creative writers from across the globe around impact activities relating to authors’ papers. The issue of preservation of authors’ drafts is particularly alive in a world where migration and displacement form an increasing aspect of their lives. Much archival material is in danger of being lost from its original contexts, or, in the case of women and minority writers, of being overlooked or ignored, and so made absent from future descriptions of writing and publishing culture.

Henslowe-Alleyn and Shakespeare projects: The website and electronic manuscript archive of the Digitisation Project relating to two theatrical producers and entrepreneurs of Shakespeare’s day, Henslowe and Alleyn, was founded in 2004. 

The Project made the documents widely available to all interested in performance history (and including that history within new performance), and to those working on the social, regional, economic and legal aspects of Early Modern England. This resource has been extended through collaboration with an interface at the Globe Theatre, London, which enables an international audience better to understand issues relating to the practicalities of theatre and performance in Shakespeare’s time. 

This Digitisation Project is now being further harnessed through collaboration on performance in new contexts by colleagues at Reading. Shakespeare in Performance workshops have been developed with "Reading Between the Lines Theatre" staff, working with primary and secondary school students at Berkshire-area schools. The workshops include theatre practice that incorporates diversity, LGBT, and special needs into the study of Shakespeare.

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