I’m excited to announce that I’ve been awarded a Stephen Copley Research Award from the British Association for Romantic Studies for research on my project ‘A Literary Inheritance: Romantic Family Histories and Textual Afterlives in the Commonplace Books of Ellen Warter‘. The project takes as its starting point two commonplace books made by Ellen Warter, the granddaughter of the Romantic poet Robert Southey, around 1885, now housed in the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and will situate these in relation to the domestic literary and material practices of her family, as well as the later nineteenth-century practice of compiling ‘Bronteana’. The Stephen Copley Research Award will facilitate the consultation of three albums produced by members of the Southey family, and will take me to Bristol, Leeds, and Keswick.
The award will accordingly enable me to develop the research that I began as part of our recent AAH panel The (After) Lives of Things, and which in many ways has become the pilot study for my postdoctoral research project on assemblage. In utilising a small sample of my chosen primary sources for the broader project, I have been able to test and evaluate the planned methodologies that I will utilise throughout its course, experience which has proved invaluable whilst writing applications for funding and other postdoctoral positions. I’ll write a longer post about the utility of the postdoc project pilot study soon. In the mean time, I’ll also be presenting this research in a forthcoming session of the University of Edinburgh’s Nineteenth-Century Research Seminars on 26 May – do come along if you’re in Edinburgh.
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