Dr Lucy Cheseldine

Profile

Research

I joined the University of Leeds in 2017, after studying in Glasgow, Alabama, and Dublin. My AHRC-funded PhD on Donald Hall’s poetics of process was supervised by Professor Andrew Warnes and Professor John Whale in the School of English at the University of Leeds. I considered Hall’s connection to a long literary tradition of American poets who have explored the relationship between language and the material world, as well as his intervention in a transatlantic scene of contemporary poetry and his inheritance of certain Modernist traditions. These aspects extended the single author project into an opportunity to revisit and revise literary legacies at large as they relate to concepts of poetic form, writerly collaboration, and media ecology.

This research was supported by archival materials from the University of New Hampshire and the Houghton Library, Harvard, that allowed me to illustrate Hall’s process of writing, drafting, and revising, and to demonstrate how he intervened in existing textual practices. I continue to work on research that is derived from my findings in the archives, including Hall’s interviews with American poets for the Paris Review, his editorial engagement with other small presses and magazines, and his implication for literary histories of writerly curation.

Teaching

I have taught at the University of Leeds as a seminar tutor and lecturer on undergraduate courses in American and related Literatures for the past four years. I was a seminar tutor on the modules Foundations to English Studies and Poetry: Reading and Interpretation. The former is designed to bridge the gap between A-level and higher education through an introduction to a range of critical theory, close reading practices, and texts by writers including Herman Melville and Gertrude Stein. In the latter, I covered poets including Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, and taught approaches to reading through archival materials.

Most recently, I collaborated with my supervisor to the design and deliver The Creative Essay, a course straddling critical studies and creative writing, in which students consider the essay form historically and analytically and then produce their own creative essay for assessment. I currently teach a module on Victorian Literature. 

Arts and public engagement projects

• Leeds Widening Participation Tutor, 2022
• The Brilliant Club, PhD Tutor, 2020–2022
• Seminar Participant, International Whitman Week, NYU, 2019
• New York City Poetry Society: Festival coordinator, research consultant and co-ordinator 2019

Publications

• Cheseldine, L. “Talking Modernism: Donald Hall’s Paris Review Interviews”, Essays in Criticism, forthcoming in July 2022.
• Cheseldine, L., “Labouring Destination: A Poetics of Inheritance in Donald Hall’s Life Work”, Oxford Research in English, vol. 11, (2020), 43–61. 
• Cheseldine, L., "The Labour of Laziness in American Literature." Comparative American Studies An International Journal, (2020), 1–2.
• Cheseldine, L., “Review: Alessandro Cabiati, 'Fabulous Operas, Rock 'n' Roll Shows: The Intoxication and Poetic Experimentation of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison”, The Jim Morrison Journal, (2019), 2–7.
• Cheseldine, Lucy, “Review: Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality” Irish Journal of American Studies, 8 (2018), web.

Conference papers

• EAAS Conference, Wastelands 2022. EAAS Poetry Network Roundtable title, “Waste, Ruins, and What Remains: Discussing the Aesthetic Legacy of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry”. Fellow participants: Professor Philip McGowan, Queens University Belfast, Dr. James Dowthwaite, University of Göttingen, Ellen Hinsey, writer.
• The Sylvia Plath Society Annual Conference, 2022. Chair of panel, “Plath’s Reception”.
• The Henry Moore Institute, Sculpture and Poetry Conference 2022. Paper title, “Work, Talk, Make: Donald Hall and Henry Moore in the Atelier”.
•  EAAS Conference, 20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal 2021. Paper Title, “Failed Language and Bovine Faeces: Wasted Space in Donald Hall’s Life Work”.
• Trinity College Dublin, The Essay Today Symposium 2020. Paper title, “A Place of Language: Donald Hall’s Poetics of Inheritance”.
• University of Leeds, Re-Working Georgics, 2019. “Translating the Soil: Transitions of Labour in Donald Hall’s Life Work”.
• University of Leeds PGR Seminar, 2019. Paper Title, “The Paris Review Years: Donald Hall’s First Acquaintance with Poets”.
• Christ Church University, Canterbury, BAAS Annual Conference 2017. Paper title, “New England Ghosts: Donald Hall’s Architecture of Grief”.
• University College Cork, IAAS Symposium 2017 “Make American –– Again?”. Paper Title, “Mark Twain, The Performer”.
• Trinity College Dublin Research Seminar. Paper title, “Theatrical Society: Class, Race and Circus Tricks in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn”.

Active memberships and networks

• Higher Education Academy, Associate Fellow, 2021
• EAAS Poetry Network  

Qualifications

• M.Phil, Literatures of the Americas, Trinity College Dublin
• M.A. (Hons), English Literature, University of Glasgow
• Junior Year Abroad, University of Alabama