Daily Archives: 19 February 2015

Haslam Postdoctoral Fellowship – Call For Applications

The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, invites applications for the 2015-2016 Jimmy and Dee Haslam Postdoctoral Fellowship, a one-year fellowship to be held August 1, 2015 to July 31, 2016 and renewable for one year. The Haslam Fellowship is open to untenured scholars in any field of late antique or early medieval studies in the period 300-1100 C.E. The Institute hopes to attract a scholar of outstanding potential with an innovative research plan, who will participate fully in the intellectual life of the Marco community throughout the academic year. During the course of the year, the Fellow will teach one graduate seminar in his or her field of expertise. The seminar will preferably use primary source materials. The Fellow receives a $1,750 travel stipend and is eligible to apply for additional travel and research funding through the Institute. Salary is $40,000 and includes full benefits.

Online application form, curriculum vitae, detailed research plan (2 single-spaced pages), and two letters of reference must be submitted by April 1, 2015. To apply, please visit the link: https://ut.taleo.net/careersection/ut_knoxville/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=1500000049, which takes you to Marco’s specific posting at UT’s online application program. You will be able to complete the online form after creating a user account. The online application provides you with opportunities to upload your c.v. and research plan. Please ask referees to send recommendations under separate cover by email attachment (Word or pdf preferred) to: Thomas E. Burman, Riggsby Director, Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, at marco@utk.edu. Recommendations should also be received by April 1, 2015.

Dr Mary Fairclough, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture
“Adam Walker, Electrical Itinerant: Science, Showmanship and Sedition 1760-1820”, Dr Mary Fairclough (University of York)

Date: 5 March 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography and Geology Building, UWA)

All Welcome!

This lecture will track the routes and the practices of scientific lecturers in the north of England in the late eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the displays of Adam Walker, a virtuoso experimenter in electricity. Walker’s lectures showcased spectacular displays of electrical phenomena. His experiments proved how electric sparks and shocks could be communicated from person to person, and this lecture will explore how electricity itself became a metaphor for many kinds of communication at this period. Walker’s lectures were open to all, and they thus raise interesting questions about the access of women and the ‘lower orders’ to scientific practice in the late eighteenth century. Despite the polite fashionable status of his lectures, electricity for Walker always stood for something politically radical. For Walker as for a man who was later his student, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, there is ‘an electric life which burns within… words’ which has the potential to change the world.

Dr Mary Fairclough, University of York, UK, based in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, is a Visiting Fellow to the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has published a monograph, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is now researching the ways in which the discourse of electrical science is appropriated in literary and political texts in the long eighteenth century.