Individual research into authorship within DeLC combines theory with practice, including practice-focused workshops and artistic experimentation. By pooling different disciplinary approaches to related phenomena such as celebrity, gender, multilingualism, political protest, intellectual communities, and cultural mediation, we show how the study of authors can act as a conduit for exploring the very nature of culture and its associated industries around the world.
The DeLC-based ‘Authors & the World’ is an interdisciplinary research hub that brings together Anglophone and non-Anglophone writers, translators, publishers, editors, reviewers and researchers from a broad sweep of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. Staff in Lancaster associated with the hub come from the departments of Languages & Cultures, Contemporary Arts (LICA), English & Creative Writing, Linguistics & English Language, Politics, Philosophy & Religious Studies, and the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre. All of our work is underpinned by in-depth analysis of a variety of different cultural contexts and a wide range of genres and media. www.authorsandtheworld.com.
Research into literary celebrity examines how authors – as opposed to their works – have been canonized or otherwise written into the cultural fabric of society from the late eighteenth century to today. Individual projects explore how new media technologies and the enhanced reproduction of visual and aural performances that they facilitate have affected the contemporary practice of authorship, how authors’ physical bodies are popularly related to their literary corpus, and how both are made tangible for posterity.
Our collaborative research on authorship brings together academics from a wide variety of disciplines with published authors, translators, literary agents, publishers and editors to explore the challenge of being a contemporary author in different social and media environments.
