Dr Clark Lawlor
BA Hons (Oxford), MA, PhD (Warwick)
Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic English Literature
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Contact details: School of Arts & Social Sciences Northumbria University Lipman Building, room 410 Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST phone: +44 (0) 191 227 4993 fax: +44 (0) 191 227 3696 clark.lawlor@northumbria.ac.uk |
Biography
I studied English literature at the University of Oxford before specialising in eighteenth-century literature for my MA and PhD at the University of Warwick, although I also retained an interest in American Literature. I then spent a year teaching at Northumbria University as a Visiting Lecturer before taking up post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Aberdeen for three years, where I worked in the field of literature and medicine. After that I spent a year doing further post-doctoral research at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA and Oxford University, UK. I then returned to Newcastle and, having taught at both Northumbria and Newcastle Universities for a year, I took up a full post at Northumbria in 2000. I became a Reader in 2007 and my current role involves Departmental and School-wide responsibilities for research management, particularly in the area of postgraduate provision. I have published widely in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and am reviewer and referee for several international journals in the areas of literature and/or the history of medicine.
Teaching Interests
I have taught many different courses in my career at both Masters and undergraduate level, but at present I am co-convening the core course (‘Canons’) in the first year and am offering two third-year options entitled ‘Writing the Body 1660-1800’ and Writing the Body 1800-1900.’ I usually teach American literature, as well English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, and have special interests in transatlantic literature.
Research Interests
I have tended to focus on representations and narratives of the body and mind, particularly disease, in literature. My monograph on representations of consumption (tuberculosis) in literature shows how metaphors of disease are structured by a multiplicity of social factors, including gender, sexuality, class and race, and I continue to extend these ideas in other publications. Most recently I have been working on representations of depression in the eighteenth century and beyond as part of my role as co-Director of our three-year Before Depression project, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Postgraduate Supervision
I supervise postgraduates, funded both by the University and the Leverhulme Trust, working on topics related to the representation of various aspects of melancholy and depression, including cure and gender, in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. I will be second supervisor for an AHRC-funded project on Laurence Sterne in collaboration with Shandy Hall. I have acted as external and internal examiner for students on eighteenth-century and early modern topics. I am keen to supervise subjects related to long eighteenth-century literature (1660-1832) and to the representation of the body and mind in literature more generally.
Funding Awards
As Co-Director: Leverhulme Trust , Before Depression: Representation and Culture of the English Malady, 1660-1800 (2006-9), £223,000
AHRB matched funding grant holder for academic year 2003-4 -Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease , £13,500
Carnegie Trust, (for research at the National Library of Scotland into the life of David Gray), 1997, £500.
3 Small Research Grants @ £2,000 each from Northumbria University internal competitions (2001-4).
Affiliations and Memberships
British Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies
British Association for Romantic Studies
British Association for Victorian Studies
British Society for Literature and Science
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
North American Association for the Study of Romanticism
IRCEL (European Universities C18th network)
American Association for the History of Medicine
North East Network for Medicine and the Arts
North East Eighteenth-Century Postgraduate Forum
Cultural Technologies of the Body Group (NE Universities)
Selected Publications
From Melancholia to Prozac: a History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Clark Lawlor and Valérie Maffre (eds.), Figures et culture de la dépression (1660-1800) / The Representation and Culture of Depression, the European Spectator, vols 10 and 11, ed. (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011)
Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century:Before Depression, 1660-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
'The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease', in Romanticism and Pleasure, Ed. Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert (Palgrave Macmillan 2010)
Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006) - Shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English Literature Book Prize 2006-08.
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