HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2017-18

Tim Lawrence, English and Related Literature

‌My research focuses on avant-garde and modernist literature in the context of European visual culture. I completed my PhD at the Department of English and Related Literature in 2016, under the supervision of Dr Emilie Morin. My PhD thesis presents a fundamental reassessment of the status of Samuel Beckett’s critical writing on art and literature, and traces how philosophical anxieties regarding the nature of visual representation shaped the fragmentary and liminal figures of Beckett’s texts. These anxieties travel from Immanuel Kant to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and show Beckett developing a new literary style informed by urgent questions about aesthetics, perception, and consciousness.

The HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship will allow me to complete Samuel Beckett’s Critical Aesthetics, a monograph drawn from my thesis, which is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for publication in 2018. The fellowship will also allow me to develop further research into Beckettian abstraction’s inheritances and cultural implications. This research pursues avenues opened in my published journal articles, has been the source for a seminar already delivered at the HRC, and forms the basis of a journal publication in progress.

During the Fellowship, I will pursue further research building on my interests in post-war French visual culture. This research engages writings at the margins of literature and philosophy, by authors such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, in a dialogue with phenomenology, surrealism, and theories of abstraction. I aim to develop these interests by fostering a series of interdisciplinary workshops in the HRC.

My HRC fellowship allowed me to complete Samuel Beckett’s Critical Aesthetics, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. This monograph significantly revises the long-held image of Beckett as a figure outside time, whose aesthetic and philosophical influences were disconnected from the artistic communities contemporary to him. The book relocates Beckett’s creative interests by focusing on his writing as a critic, translator and thinker on literature and the visual arts, before it argues that these apparently marginal texts played a serious role in his development of a minimalist aesthetic of ignorance in the novels which made Beckett’s literary reputation. I am currently producing a chapter forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook to Samuel Beckett. Other interests pursued during the fellowship, above all in the novels of Patrick Modiano, remain unconcluded.

Emma Martin, History

‌I completed my doctorate in the Department of History in 2017. My doctoral research focused on the concept of idleness in late medieval English society. The crisis of labour in the post Black Death period has held the attention of scholars for decades. However, at the crux of the social and economic tensions of this period is the concept of idleness, the absence of productivity within the realm. This is the lacuna that my research has aimed to fill. By interrogating the concept of idleness in the period we can better understand how contemporaries understood the crisis, and how this influenced their reactions to it.

I hope the HRC Postdoctoral Fellowship will allow me to develop my PhD research further to encompass not just lay society but also how the crisis affected those within religious communities. Like my thesis, this research will require a transdisciplinary approach, requiring examinations of language, literature and administrative records. I will examine religious writings on the contemplative and active forms of work, literary representations of idleness within religious institutions in clerical satire before looking at visitation records to see how, in practice, idleness was regulated within the religious community. My aim is that this will round out my doctoral research into a what I hope to be a significant contribution and publication (a monograph entitled The Performance of Idleness in the Late Medieval Society) in the field of late medieval social history.

Andy Needham, Archaeology

I am an archaeologist specialising in Palaeolithic art. In 2017 I completed my PhD research, which focussed on the analysis and interpretation of portable art objects from the site of Montastruc, France. I used an object biography approach to reconstruct the production, use, and deposition of art at the site, combining techniques such as microscopy and 3D modeling alongside a non-western animistic framework constructed through engagement with anthropology and ethnographic studies. The results of this approach suggested that only through an exploration of the full life history of the art could their meaning be appreciated. I argued that at Montastruc, there was a blurring of natural and cultural: only evocatively shaped blocks of limestone, modified by freeze-thaw action, were selected for engraving, with the animals engraved respecting the native shape of the block, before finally being intentionally fragmented through the deposition of the blocks into hearths.

During my time at the HRC I will publish chapters of my PhD as papers and expand beyond it to write two further papers. The first will explore the object biographies of Neanderthal art objects. The significant of Neanderthal art will be considered within the context of contemporary human evolutionary narratives and in light of recent DNA research that demonstrates interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. The second paper will explore Palaeolithic art in relation to the origins of prehistoric archaeology and an emerging concept of human evolution during the mid to late 19th century. Here its role in simplicity/complexity narratives linked to a gradualist understanding of human evolution will be explored.

Richard Powell, Music

My PhD research focused on the relationship between music and time. I investigated the ways in which music brings our perception of time into focus, and in turn the way in which consideration of temporal concepts might deepen our understanding of musical form. I analysed pieces from the classical tradition (both old and new) with the aim of unpacking some of the ways in which their structures might encourage listeners to engage with their experience of time.

I loved exploring this topic, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to continue to do so with this HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Much of my work will revolve around The Nature of Nordic Music, a book project led by Dr Tim Howell under contract with Routledge, for which I am acting as an assistant editor. Bringing together scholars from different Nordic countries, it seeks to embrace the creativity that has emerged from the region. For this, I am co-authoring a chapter with Dr Howell that develops some of the ideas from my thesis; it will explore how concerns regarding regional identity and musical timescale aid effective communication in pieces by Kaija Saariaho and Hans Abrahamsen. I look forward to writing this alongside my work for the music department as a tutor on the MA Music Education course led by Dr Liz Haddon. The HRC has always provided a friendly and inspiring environment in which to work, and I look forward to being able to continue to be a part of it this year.

The past academic year - during which I have been fortunate to have held a HRC Postdoctoral Fellowship - has been an especially busy one. For the second year since initially submitting my PhD, I have worked on a freelance basis as a lecturer, tutor and supervisor for the Department of Music, leading an undergraduate module and working as part of a three-person teaching team for the MA in Music Education: Instrumental and Vocal Teaching. My roles within these contexts have continued to develop and expand, and the time spent teaching and supervising has been especially rewarding. As might be expected, though, this work has also been extremely time consuming, and at many points throughout the year it has been a struggle to devote time to my own research interests. Although my teaching commitments have prevented me from engaging with the wider culture of the HRC to the extent that I had hoped, it has proved crucial in allowing me to create enough time and space to continue to develop as a researcher during a period in which I might easily have otherwise been able to.

Thanks to the support of the HRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, I have been able to co-author a chapter with Professor Tim Howell on issues of timescale and communication in the music of Kaija Saariaho and Hans Abrahamsen, due to be published in the multi-author book The Nature of Nordic Music 2019 by Routledge. I have also been able to work as the assistant editor to Professor Howell, the editor of this volume, and this has been an invaluable experience in terms of developing a familiarity with publication requirements, equipping me with knowledge and skills that I hope will allow me to embark upon future editorial projects on a similar scale. Arrangements are being made to publicise and promote aspects of this research project drawing together academics from across the Nordic region on BBC Radio 3, and at a conference in Finland. In addition to my involvement with this project, the fellowship has also allowed me the time to propose a chapter on the music of Thomas Adès adapting aspects of my doctoral research. I currently have plans to propose a special edition for a musicological journal bringing together academics within the music department at York, and to undertake music education research alongside Dr Elizabeth Haddon.

I would like to thank the HRC for its very generous support - has allowed me to maintain a side of my career that might easily have slowed to a halt without such assistance and encouragement. As of the start of this academic year, I have begun work for the University as a full-time Associate Lecturer, and the HRC has played a vital role in helping me reach this point in my career.

David Price, Philosophy

My PhD thesis focused on the issue of mathematical ontology and its relationship to scientific practice. I argued that given naturalistic constraints on acceptable ontology, the place of mathematics, and in particular mathematical objects (numbers, sets, functions, etc.), in our broader conceptual scheme seems problematic. At the same time, the ubiquity of mathematics in our current best science strongly suggests (via some version of the indispensability argument) that mathematical objects are an ineliminable part of any naturalist ontology. In the thesis I argued that a particular kind of fictionalism about mathematics could enable us to resolve this tension in our naturalistic conceptual scheme by dismissing mathematical objects from the ontology of current best science.

In the second half of my thesis, I examined a number of metaphilosophical objections to this fictionalist approach to ontology, and it is this line of research that I hope to continue in my time with the HRC. One aim for the year is to develop one of the chapters of the thesis (on Huw Price’s anti-representationalism) into a paper for publication. A second aim for the year is to explore ways of resisting a certain strain of anti-metaphysical sentiment that is currently popular within the branch of philosophy known as metaontology. In particular, I hope to look at forms of metaontological realism that are consistent with a broadly Quinean approach to ontology. At the same time, I aim to expand upon those portions of my thesis that were critical of particular varieties of metaontological anti-realism, looking for ways in which we might provide a more unified refutation of modern anti-metaphysics.