With a research background in the poetry of the 19th century, Dr Clara Dawson, a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Manchester, is currently working on a project on avian poetics in the period of the Industrial Revolution as part of her two-month fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub.
Dr Dawson, who is visiting in association with the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Trinity, says this new project on birds is a “foray into environmental humanities” inspired by the human and non-human relationships behind the poetry she has looked at from 1790 to 1910. The project combines poetry, natural history, and conservation science, and also takes in the history of fossil fuel capitalism and imperialism.
She has also been motivated by a sense of wanting her work to have a “social purpose to it”. “I personally find it hard to ignore the climate crisis. It feels like something that I want to work on and think about. For me, public engagement in quite a big part of the project”, says the visiting fellow, who, as part of this project, is collaborating with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust in Manchester and will also give a talk to Bird Watch Ireland during her fellowship. “I’m using poetry to help people engage with conservation issues”, she says. Dr Dawson has recently edited a special series of articles on 'Poetry and Birds Through the Ages', forthcoming with Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Literature, 2022.
I personally find it hard to ignore the climate crisis. It feels like something that I want to work on and think about. For me, public engagement in quite a big part of the project.
Dr Clara Dawson
While hoping to connect with many other researchers across the School of English and the Centre for Environmental Humanities during her stay, Dr Dawson is also looking to examine a collection of 19th century natural history books held in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. In addition, she hopes to visit the ‘Dead Zoo’ – Dublin’s Natural History Museum -- and the National Museum of Ireland to view their bird collections.
William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are just some of the poets that Dr Dawson will focus on as part of this project—a primarily British selection—although she also hopes to expand into what she describes as indigenous poetry from some of the settler colonies, a challenging task, she notes, given the way this poetry was collected during the 19th century and because much of it is anonymous.
As part of her public engagement work on this project, Dr Dawson wants to “use poetry to get audiences to engage with conservation issues.” She has worked with some schools in inner city Manchester whose students, she says, don’t typically have much access or engagement with nature. Using creative writing and poetry helps to “increase the emotional engagement that people have”, she argues. In addition to taking them on bus trips to nearby nature reserves, she hopes to convey to these students that “birds are companions”, bringing “wonder and awe and curiosity”, but that we’re also creating habitats that are not sustainable for them.
The interdisciplinary aspect to Dr Dawson’s project is also essential in terms of addressing the climate crisis, despite the challenges of having to bridge the knowledge gap into topics such as natural history that she hasn’t worked on before. “The climate crisis calls for interdisciplinarity because it’s not simply one discipline that is going to be able to address this on its own. It demands collaboration between the arts and the sciences.”
About Dr Clara Dawson:
Clara Dawson is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Manchester. As a specialist in poetry of the long nineteenth century, her research has developed along two pathways: print culture and environmental humanities. Her early career focused on print culture and resulted in a monograph, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation (Oxford University Press, 2020). This book evolved new methodologies for analysing poetry and periodicals, a significant development in a field dominated by archival theory and book history. Research published since her monograph has focused on the gift annual, an important and under-researched area of Romantic and Victorian print culture.