Saturday 22 October 2016

Why I edit books

The fetishisation of the monograph is not a new concept.  Back in 2005 the MLA "deplored the 'fetishisation of the monograph' and called for a new metric to demonstrate scholarly worth, such as a body of articles, translations of works, electronic databases, etc'.* 

I raise the issue of the fetishisation of the monograph here, because I was told recently that it would benefit my career more, if I was to concentrate on writing single-author monographs, rather than editing lots of books.  It appears to follow from this, that editing and contributing to books and journals is of lesser scholarly value, and that the monograph (and only the monograph) represents the pinnacle of intellectual accomplishment.  It is a shame that such narrow judgements on scholarly esteem still drive certain parts of academia.  In the age of generic diversity and digital publishing, it is a limited and ultimately self-defeating definition of intellectual endeavour and academic merit.  


Driven by intellectual curiosity, my convictions, and enthusiasm for the diversity that literature possesses, I have published many articles and contributed many chapters to books.  I am really proud of all the contributions I have made to journals and books.  I recognise the effort and determination that went into each and every one of them, and that these publications have passed the peer review of my colleagues in these fields
.  If taken together, these works would constitute several single-author monographs.  But that would have been to the detriment of the edited volumes the publications appeared in, and thus defeated the point. Academic endeavour is devalued if it focuses on the packaging only.

I am extremely proud of the books and journal I am currently editing.  Enabling others to contribute to books and journals, as I myself have, is a crucial feature of collegial scholarship. I derive an intense sense of accomplishment from engaging in collaborative work and the community it builds. Working with other scholars and artists, across national and disciplinary boundaries, is really important in this time of Brexit isolationism.  As a Danish scholar working in Britain, I feel this strongly.  Collaborative work ensures a multifaceted content with a broader appeal and more impact.  The single-author monograph doesn't generally have a great deal of impact. Print runs are small, and the appeal is limited.  


I may publish a single-author monograph one day, or I may not. When I do, it will be on the basis of the form fitting my
 argument rather than dictating it.    






*Colin Steele, "Back to the Future: Twenty-First Century Models for the Scholarly Monograph." In Bernhardt, Beth R; Daniels, Tim; Steinle, Kim; Strauch, Katina P (Eds.) Charleston Conference Proceedings 2005. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2006. pp. 118-125. 121.

Saturday 1 October 2016

PaCCS research bid successful!

My crime studies colleagues and I have been successful in gaining funding from AHRC and ESRC for our one-year research project on Representation of Human Trafficking!  We won an Innovation Award from Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.  You can see the announcement plus a list of the other Innovation Award winners here




The Principal Investigator of our project is Christiana Gregoriou of Leeds University, and she leads the international, interdisciplinary research team consisting of Melissa Deary of Hull University;  Nina Muzdeka of University of Novi Sad;  Ilse Ras from Leeds University;  Bernie Gravett, Head of Specialist Policing, and myself.

Monday 3 October is the official Launch Day for our project, so look out for plenty of social media activity and further announcements.  I will also be posting links here to our project Twitter, Facebook page, and blog.

Monday 19 September 2016

Irish Masculinity in Crisis - new publication

I am very pleased to have a chapter on Irish masculinities in crisis in a newly published book edited by Catherine Rees of Loughborough University. The book is entitled Masculinity in Crisis: Depictions of Modern Male Trauma in Ireland, and is published by Carysfort Press.  



This book provides fresh insight into diverse representations of Irish masculinity.  As Catherine explains in her summary of the book's focus: 

"The purpose of this book is to locate this sense of crisis within Irish contexts, fill a current gap in academic discourse surrounding literary, theatrical and cinematic depictions of Irish masculinity, and discuss how fictional representations of masculinity and maleness in contemporary Ireland have addressed, explored and discussed images of men in states of anxiety, crisis and chaos."  



The title of my chapter  is ‘"Still a Respected Man": Irish Masculinity in Crisis and Crime Fiction’.  Exploring the implications of a quotation from Stuart Neville's novel The Twelve, 'still a respected man', my chapter examines the meanings of 'respect', agency and masculinity in Irish crime fiction. As the basis for my analysis, I discuss two specific contemporary Irish crime novels in my chapter, namely Ken Bruen's Priest and Neville Thompson's Mama's Boys.  Both these phenomenal novels offer complex, brilliantly depicted portrayals of Irish masculinities and settings that stay vivid in the reader's mind long after they've closed the books.






The work for this was so interesting for me to undertake, as it gave me the opportunity to reflect further on the depiction of masculinity in crisis in crime fiction, a topic I have been preoccupied with for some time.  In 2013 I published an article on masculinity  in crime fiction, in Clues: A Journal of Detection . The article examined John Harvey's novel Easy Meat, and is called: "'There's Nothing People Won't Do to One Another, if the Circumstances Are Right’:  Male Rape and the Politics of Representation in John Harvey’s Police Procedural Easy Meat". Turning my attention to Irish crime fiction, I found a fascinating array of complicated male characters reflecting and/or embodying the contemporary Irish society in which they are situated.

Tuesday 13 September 2016

Women Versed in Myth - new publication


I am very pleased to announce the publication of the book Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets, edited by Colleen S. Harris-Keith and Valerie Estelle Frankel, and published by McFarland. The volume examines women's poetic responses to myth from scholarly, creative and teaching perspectives.  I have a chapter in the book, entitled "Reimagining Myth and the Maternal with Ruth Fainlight, Margaret Atwood and Katie Donovan". 



I was particularly happy to have the opportunity to research and write on three female poets whose work I very much admire:  the Canadian poet and author Margaret Atwood, the British/American poet Ruth Fainlight, and the Irish poet Katie Donovan.  They are very different poets, yet all three offer rich and complicated treatments of mythology in their work, and my chapter proposes ways of reading these multi-faceted representations from feminist and maternal perspectives.

I have a long-standing interest in women's poetry which I have also published on previously.  My chapter in Women Versed in Myth examines the myriad ways in which women have creatively reimagined mythology and reclaimed female figures in order to explore hitherto marginalised or ignored dimensions of women's experience and to energise poetic language and form.  The chapter furthermore contains a section on maternal perspectives and uses of mythic mother figures in Fainlight, Atwood and Donovan.  In her introduction to the volume, Valerie Frankel states that in my chapter, I examine "reimaginings through the European tradition, as Ruth Fainlight recreates the sibyl as writer and katie Donovan tackles gender politics for the Irish Queen Medb and violated goddess Macha."



Tuesday 30 August 2016

Postcolonial Crime Fiction - new article

I am really pleased to have published my article on Irish crime fiction, called '"The Third Ireland': Inheritance and Postcolonialism in Irish Crime Writing" in the new special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.  The topic of the JCPS special issue is Postcolonial Crime Fiction, and the issue is edited by South African crime fiction specialist Dr Sam Naidu.  You can view the contents page here




This image above is of the cover for the JCPS special issue - really interesting image, I think!  Perfect for this special issue, with its multifaceted examination of postcolonialism as a prism for crime fiction.  

I am happy to be a great company in this special issue, and particularly to have had the opportunity to write about Irish postcolonial identities and crime writing.  My article focuses on selected texts from the 2011 anthology edited by declan Burke entitled Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing In The 21st Century. 



I examine selected texts from the 2011 anthology edited by declan Burke entitled Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing In The 21st Century.  In the article I explore questions of inheritance and postcolonial identity in relation to John Connolly’s essay “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre,” and Jane Casey’s crime short story “Inheritance.”

Tuesday 1 March 2016

New publication - The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future

Louisa Mackay Demerjian's edited book, The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future has just been published!  The book "examines the recent popularity of the dystopian genre in literature and film, as well as connecting contemporary manifestations of dystopia to cultural trends and the implications of technological and social changes on the individual and society as a whole."


You can get a sense of the wide-ranging discussions presented in this book from the The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future contents page.

I am very pleased to have contributed to this book with a chapter on one of my favourite writers, the Australian children's and YA author Kirsty Murray.  Her dystopian novel from 2009, Vulture's Gate, forms the basis for my chapter which examines the representation of gender and imaginative use of the Australian landscape in the novel.  It was very satisfying to get the opportunity to write about another of the genres close to my heart, the dystopia. 


The title of my chapter, "Last Girl Alive": Kirsty Murray's Dystopian YA Novel Vulture's Gate, uses a quotation from Murray's novel in order to reflect on gender and the way in which it becomes a battleground, in a dystopian society characterised by desperation, violent conflict, sectarianism, environmental damage and abuses of power.   These are themes and ideas that reverberate throughout much YA and adult dystopian literature.  However, through its powerful depiction of Australian landscapes and characters, Murray's Vulture's Gate creates a unique and utterly compelling story.

Australian dystopian fiction, and literature in general, deserves much more critical recognition than it is currently receiving, and I am pleased to have had the opportunity to research and write about Kirsty Murray's work once again.

Wednesday 24 February 2016

New publication on Agatha Christie

Another publication of  mine has now appeared in print, and I am very pleased about it!  It has been a difficult year, with health problems of various  kinds. But seeing this piece published has reminded me again of all that I value so much about research and writing.

This latest piece developed out of my enthusiasm for reading short stories.  I have a long-standing fascination with the crime short story as a specific literary form, and am interested in investigating the way in which the crime short story has evolved over time as a particular subgenre of crime fiction. This preoccupation of mine led me to reassess Agatha Christie's work. Christie has long been regarded as one of the most popular crime fiction authors of all time, and as part of her impressive oeuvre she also wrote crime short stories. I became interested in Christie's short fiction, particularly the Mr Quin short stories.  These short texts feature some of the specific elements we have come to associate with her crime writing, while at the same time reflecting the social and cultural questions of the interwar period - the heyday of what is often referred to as the Golden Age.


I have a chapter on Agatha Christie's Mr Quin stories in a book just published by McFarland, edited by Christie scholar and expert Jamie Bernthal.  The book is entitled The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy.






I am really pleased with how this chapter turned out, and thrilled to have had the opportunity to write on Agatha Christie - something I have wanted to do for a long time.  The contents page of the book will give you a glimpse into the fascinating and varied perspectives on Christie's work presented here.  


Once again this year, Jamie Bernthal is organising a conference on Agatha Christie and her work.  The theme this year is "The ageless Agatha Christie", and you can find out more detail about the event here - it is promising to be a fantastic conference!  Sadly, I am unable to go this year.  But if you, like me, are fascinated by Agatha Christie's work and want to investigate the reasons for its enduring appeal, do go.  And read The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy!

Monday 18 January 2016

Black Cultural Archives news

"Black History is everyone's history" (David Olusoga)

I am very excited to hear that Black Cultural Archives are currently working with BBC2 on a new commissioned series on the topic of black history in Britain.  

Historian David Olusoga previously presented the fascinating and poignant two-part series, "The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire" , shown on BBC2 in 2014.
(Image from theartsdesk.com) 

The new series on black history will also be presented by David Olusoga who has also written it. He describes the four-part series as a project which is: "aim[ing] to overturn the image of black history as a marginal side-bar to mainstream history with new, dramatic and at times shocking chapters from our collective past." 

Director of Black Cultural Archives Paul Reid, said: "This exciting series will uncover the less-known historical narratives, providing an insight into the Black presence in Britain and documenting the richness of British history."


(image from www.brixtonblog.com)

This series will be essential viewing for everyone studying or researching history in Britain.