Research project
Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830
- Start date: 1 January 2024
- End date: 31 October 2024
- Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Primary investigator: Dr Jeremy Davies
- External co-investigators: Professor Mary-Ann Constantine, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
Value
£24,587
Partners and collaborators
Greenfield Valley Heritage Park; Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust
Description
This network brings together historians of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century literature and economics. Together, we explore a classic scholarly problem: what was the relationship between culture and economic change in Britain around 1800? How did British Romantic literature intersect with the roughly contemporaneous first Industrial Revolution?
In recent decades, the dialogue between literary and economic historians of the period has been hampered by increasing disciplinary specialisation. Our network re-starts this suspended interdisciplinary exchange, through a series of in-person and online symposia. We focus particularly on ecological concerns. The period from 1770 to 1830 is a critical one in global environmental history. How can those decades help us to put the present-day environmental crisis in its historical context?
Partnership with heritage organisations is at the heart of the network. We are working with Greenfield Valley Heritage Park, in North Wales, to understand the global and colonial trade networks in which Greenfield Valley once played a crucial role; and with Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, the custodians of a globally significant monument of heavy industry, to reassess the history of fossil energy.
The network unites eminent scholars with early career researchers and heritage professionals. It lays the foundation for future multidisciplinary collaborations that aim to trace the continuing artistic, social and environmental legacies of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.