Projects

The Senses: Past and Present

Co-principal investigators: Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern), Prof. Fiona Macpherson (University of Glasgow), and Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow): This sensory studies project brings medieval sensory studies into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and science. Past international conferences and workshops, funded by the SNSF and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, at the Universities of Bern and Glasgow; 2023 conference at Monte Verità, Ascona, funded by Centro Stefano Franscini.

Sensing Creation: Perception and the Book of Nature in Anglo-Saxon England (SNF Project Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler)

‘Sensing Creation’ seeks to uncover how learned Anglo-Saxon writers understood perception and how the senses allowed people to make sense of the world around them, that is God’s Creation. The project examines this interface between the senses and the external world both in the learned Latin texts which circulated in Anglo-Saxon England and in Old English vernacular writing. Where much recent research has utilised ecocritical theory to approach the ‘natural world’ in Anglo-Saxon England, this project instead turns to early medieval thinking about the external world, allowing us to understand medieval texts on their own terms. This way of examining medieval texts depends, moreover, on the Biblical metaphor of the ‘book of nature’, which signified that one could come to know God by studying his Creation. Central to this metaphor is the idea of reading, an act dependent on sight, hearing, and to a lesser extent touch, faculties of sense which we already suspect to have been of central importance in the Anglo-Saxon understanding of perception. Finally, this project, as the first systematic study of the senses in Anglo-Saxon England, will be a substantial contribution to this burgeoning field of inquiry.

Dialect at the fairground: mobility and language variation among a nomadic British community

Nov. 2018 – Oct. 2022 SNF Project

This research project analyses the dialect spoken by Travelling Showpeople in East Anglia, England. Travelling Showpeople are a cultural group who live a nomadic lifestyle due to their occupation which mainly entails operating travelling funfairs. They are described as an extremely close-knit, family-centred community who have little contact with the settled population. Why is this interesting? Firstly, English dialectology has tended to shun nomadic speakers since they are often not deemed to represent authentic speakers of a place. Despite the existence of various nomadic groups in England, there has always been a strong focus on geographical continuity and local embeddedness. Secondly, the Travelling Showpeople are a relatively isolated community with a distinctive lifestyle. Analysing their dialect will enable us to theorise to what extent such speakers are able to acquire sedentary dialect norms and how language change enters such communities and is transmitted from one generation to the next. 

Project team: Prof Dr David Britain (PI) and Sarah Grossenbacher (PhD candidate).

Mediating the Ecological Imperative -- Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl

The goal of this SNSF Sinergia project (2021-2024) is to research the way twentieth and twenty-first century cultural products respond to the ethical demands the ecological crisis places on our society and how this manifests in the formats that mediate these demands. Examples of these cultural mediations are part of a growing consciousness about the image politics of climate change and the role of cultural sustainability or examined according to the principles of contemporary eco-aesthetics and new documentary ecologies. We take the notion of an “ecological imperative” of cultural products—an ethical stance toward human resource management built upon Kantian terms—as a starting point. This SNSF Sinergia project builds on the rich research results of the Environmental Humanities and propels the state of the art by exploring the mediation of ethical demands engrained in images, literary texts and eco-ekphrases, expanded artforms, and practices of social engagement. We ask how specific formats in cultural production work intermedially to engender the ecological imperative. Our corpus differentiates between specific formats and modes from across the disciplines of image studies, literary studies, art history, and social anthropology. Our objects of study are examples of cultural products’ potential to inspire human beings to take action and to acknowledge the demands of an ecological imperative. Due to our common expertise, the geographical focus is on the Americas.

The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century.

August 2020 - July 2024. SNF Project. The beach is an important space in Western literature. Ever since the rise in popularity of the seaside holiday, the beach has been depicted as a site of leisure, sensuous enjoyment and play, clearly distinguished from and often in a dialectical relationship with industrialised and metropolitan spaces of work. Despite its significance as a spatial frame in fiction, travel writing and memoirs, however, the beach has played a relatively minor role in scholarship until fairly recently. This project seeks to redress this neglect, focussing on a period in which the beach has undergone dramatic changes, both in everyday culture and in literary and artistic representations: the ‘long twentieth century,’ dating roughly from 1890 to the present. Team: Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter, PD. Dr. Ursula Kluwick, Guðrun í Jákupsstovu.

Elite Creativities: Engaging the Language Work of Professional Wordsmiths

May 2020 to April 2023. SNF Project. In short, the Elite Creativities project seeks to make substantial contributions to the field of critical sociolinguistics. As a multi-sited discourse-ethnography, the project has four unifying aims: (1) to investigate three domains of professional language work largely or completely overlooked by language scholars; (2) to expand scholarship on language and political economy by looking at more elite, “high-end” forms of language work; (3) to generate new empirical insights into two cutting-edge issues in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, namely semiotic ideology and discursive creativity; and (4) to apply a discourse-ethnographic research design centering practitioners’ reflexive accounts of their work. Team: Prof. Dr. Crispin Thurlow (PI), Dr. Gwynne Mapes (postdoc) and Olivia Droz-Dit-Busset (doc). Affiliated doctoral researcher: Lara Portmann. Student Research Assistant: Nicolas Röthlisberger.

Articulating Privilege: A New Geographical Methodology for Sociolinguistics

January 2020 - December 2021. SNF Project. In short, the main objective of this project is to implement an experimental research method in sociolinguistics, a field which studies the use of language in everyday social/institutional contexts. The method is called a “discourse-centered commodity chain analysis” and offers a chance to examine pressing social issues and cutting-edge scientific developments. The project borrows from geography (and economics) commodity chain analysis which entails “mapping” all the activities involved in the design, production, marketing and consumption of a single product or commodity. The project redesigns this method in a way that highlights linguistic and communicative practices (i.e. “discourse”) at each stage. To this end, a particular but slightly unorthodox object of analysis is used – the business-class airline meal – which is selected as a quintessential manifestation of contemporary privilege. Team: Prof. Dr. Crispin Thurlow, Noëlle Haudenschild (student research assistant), as well as the professional photographer, Daniel Rihs.

Canonicity, Obscenity, and the Making of Modern Chaucer (COMMode): An Investigation of the Transmission and Audiences of The Canterbury Tales from 1700 to 2020

January 2020 – December 2024. This SNSF Eccellenza project will recover the untold history of how Chaucer became both an icon of English literary fame and an icon of obscene humour by examining the evolution of his most famous text alongside the evolution of his reputation between 1700 and the present day. The project team includes Prof. Dr. Mary C. Flannery (project leader) and Dr Amy Brown (postdoctoral researcher) and will also include a doctoral researcher, who will join the project in the autumn of 2020.

Auto_Bio_Graphy: Historiographic Perspectives on Ego Documents/Personal Testimonies in Literature and the Visual and Performative Arts -- Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl