The debate over "gold" open access in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was explored in February in the Times Higher Education cover story. The article featured interview material with Dr Martin Paul Eve and myself, as Academic Project Directors of the Open Library of Humanities, an open access publishing project we launched in January 2013.

As Paul Jump writes:

Modelled on the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, although not formally connected to them, the Open Library of Humanities aims to establish its prestige – and confirm the rigour of its peer review – by recruiting "big names" on to its editorial board. Eve, who a year ago established the small open-access journal Alluvium with Edwards, says one sure-fire way to boost interest in signing up to its various boards will be to raise significant sums of money.

 

To this end, the journal is working with contacts in California's Stanford area – including PLoS – to access between $1 million (£633,000) and $1.5 million in start-up funding. The duo also hope to convince institutions that regard the project as worthwhile to contribute smaller sums so that article fees can be kept to a minimum. "A base requirement is that those who can't afford the fee will have it waived," Eve says. A number of governing committees for the journal have already been formed, including the all-important academic steering and advocacy committee, "where academics will come in and tell us what they want".

 

A decision has already been taken to offer a PLoS-style facility for online comments on papers and article-level metrics, although Eve emphasises that such innovations will be phased in gradually to avoid delivering too much of a "culture shock". He also hopes the journal will eventually expand into the social sciences. 

 

Edwards says the "groundswell of support" for Open Library makes her confident of being able to launch within a year. "Groups affiliated with some of the Ivy League universities are looking to invest long term in what they see as the future of academic research and publishing, and that is already happening in the sciences," she says. "The question is why it hasn't already happened in the humanities … It feels like the time is right."

For the full article, see the Times Higher Education's website.

I'm delighted to be able to announce the launch of an open access project called the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). My colleague at Lincoln Dr Martin Paul Eve and I are the Academic Project Directors of this initiative, which will establish a journal and database for the humanities and social sciences, in the style of the Public Library of Science (PLOS). 

Since launching our second website on 22nd January 2013, we've received an overwhelming amount of support and media coverage. The Library Journal ran 2 articles on the OLH (a Q&A with Martin Paul Eve and a follow-up news item), the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on us, the LSE Impact Blog published an article by Martin on the OLH, and the Times Higher Education featured the OLH in their cover story on Gold Open Access publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).

Please do check out the website and contact us if you'd like to get involved in any capacity.

Image by Thomas Guignard under a CC-BY-NC-SA license

I've been invited to contribute an article to a special issue of the journal Paradoxa titled "African Science Fiction," edited by Dr Mark Bould. Having taught Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi (1984) for my 3rd year Science Fiction module recently (more module info here), I'm keen to consider in more detail the way in which the novel opens up so many questions concerning the problems of boundaries (men/women, West/Other, "primitive" culture/technologised modernity, utopian dream/material reality etc.) and refuses any easy final position. It's also a novel that remains extremely relevant, for instance in terms of its raising of questions of universalising liberal humanist assumptions concerning women's rights and its simultaneous critique of cultural relativism (particularly concerning female genital mutilation – which Emecheta addresses in other texts also).

I'd like to contextualise the novel with relation to Emecheta's other "realist" literary works and life writing (such as her 1972 autobiographical novel In the Ditch). Finally, I'd like to consider whether this text can help us rethink how we read West African feminist writing and utopian and science fiction.

For more information on Buchi Emecheta, see the British Council contemporary writers site.

In April 2013, my PhD student Chris Callow and I co-organised a conference dedicated to SF writer and academic Adam Roberts titled "New Genre Army: An International Conference on the Writing of Adam Roberts."

The conference is part of the Gylphi "Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays" series and selected papers will be published in Adam Roberts: Critical Essays, ed. Caroline Edwards and Christos Callow Jr. (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015). The conference was held at the University of Lincoln on 5th April 2013 – for the call for papers see here: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=198687.

Damien Walter wrote a column for the Guardian shortly before the conference, which discussed Roberts' importance as a contemporary SF writer as well as the "New Genre Army" network. You can read the article on the Guardian website. Meanwhile, Chris Callow published an interview with Adam Roberts for Strange Horizons prior to the conference.

A podcast recorded by Lincoln's Siren FM containing interviews with Professor Farah Mendlesohn, Professor Edward James, Adam Roberts, Damien Walter and myself can be found on this soundcloud upload. 

I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to the US in Autumn 2011 to attend a fantastic conference, "Critical Refusals: The 4th Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society," held at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2011. Whilst this was the biennial conference of the Society, in the months leading up to the conference the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement rapidly spread from New York's financial district at Zuccotti Park to city occupations all around the world, and the atmosphere at the conference was significantly  influenced by the presence of those radical, non-hierarchical reclamations of public space that Herbert Marcuse had theorised in the late 1960s.

After a brilliant keynote address to a packed and electric audience, the conference delegates marched with Marcuse's former student Professor Angela Davis on the two-mile journey from the Irvine Auditorium (where Marcuse had spoken at a similarly electric meeting in 1971) to Occupy Philly. As reported in the Huffington Post, Davis gave a speech to protesters using the "human mic" (you can see Angela's address to Occupy Philly on YouTube).

My paper addressed the question of eschatological temporality in Marcuse's early text Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Beacon Press, 1955) and I've been invited to contribute this research as a journal article for a special issue on "Marcuse After Secularism" in the quarterly American journal Telos:

From Eros to Eschaton: Herbert Marcuse’s Liberation of Time

Article Abstract:

This article explores what Gershom Scholem has called Herbert Marcuse’s “unacknowledged ties to [his] Jewish heritage.” At the core of Marcuse’s vision of transformed, non-repressive social relations, I argue, is a struggle over time, which rests upon a distinctly Jewish approach to the twin questions of remembrance and redemption. One example of this approach is the temporal dialectic between alienated labor time and the timelessness of pleasure’s desire for eternity which underpins Marcuse’s analysis in Eros and Civilisation (1956). This dialectic rests upon Marcuse’s reading of the Freudian Eros-Todestrieb dualism, whose phylogenetic reading of patricide has been read by critics as reformulating the biblical rebellion against an authoritarian Yahweh.

See below for the PowerPoint slides accompanying the original conference paper:

I've been developing a new literary methodology for analysing twenty-first century British fictions over the course of the past 5 years, and one of my preoccupations is the way in which time functions in many novels: not only in terms of an increasingly self-relflexive temporal sensibility, but also in terms of structuring generic and aesthetic experimentations. A great example of this can be found in the three published novels by former Guardian musical correspondent Sam Taylor. Arguably the most inventive and exciting writer to engage with temporality in the twenty-first-century, Taylor's debut novel The Republic of Trees (Faber, 2005) offers an astonishing, dystopian vision of adolescent revolutionary idealism that responds to three influential predecessors (which are all also first novels): William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden (1978), and Iain M. Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984).

On 14th-15th September 2012 Tony Venezia and I co-organised a 2-day academic conference dedicated to the writing of China Miéville, called "Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville." The conference was co-supported by the University of Lincoln's English Department, Birkbeck's School of Arts, the Institute of English Studies (IES) at Senate House, and Gylphi: Arts & Humanities Publisher.

Speakers and delegates included China Miéville, Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside), Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Professor Neil Easterbook (Texas Christian University), Professor John Rieder (University of Hawai'i at Manoa), Professor Farah Mendelsohn (Anglia Ruskin University), Dr Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University), Dr Paul March-Russell (University of Kent), Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders (Kansas State University) and Damien Walter (The Guardian).

In his Guardian article on the conference, Damien Walter wrote that "Weird Council was remarkable for many reasons," and offered "an excellent start" in rethinking the literary movement of the weird.

Tony Venezia and I will co-edit China Miéville: Critical Essays (forthcoming with Gylphi in 2013/14).

See here for the programme and conference webite. You can also download podcasts of some of the keynotes.

Here's a Storified version of the live-tweeting from the conference (with thanks to Iain Robert Smith).

I recently worked with Dr Sarah Dillon from the University of St Andrews and Anthony Levings, the Managing Editor of the arts and humanities publisher Gylphi, to organise a two-day international conference dedicated to the work of British novelist Maggie Gee. The conference brought scholars together for the first academic event dedicated to Maggie Gee’s writing. We were delighted that Maggie herself attended the conferene and gave readings of My Cleaner and The Flood (YouTube clips forthcoming shortly), as well as answering questions in a public Q&A, and our keynote speakers Professor Susan Alice Fischer (City University of New York) and Dr John Sears (Manchester Metroplitan University) gave outstanding plenaries.

Since she was selected for Granta’s first list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 (in company with Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain), Gee has worked in publishing, academic research (gaining a PhD in the twentieth-century novel from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1980) and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working as one of the Society’s Vice Presidents, as well as acting as Visiting Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her publishing and academic responsibilities, Gee is also highly critically acclaimed: her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was shortlisted in 2002 for the Orange Prize for Fiction as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.

Gee is one of Britain’s most prolific and critically-acclaimed novelists: the author of 12 novels, as well as collections of short stories, edited anthologies of contemporary writing and, most recently, an autobiography – My Animal Life (Telegram Books, 2010; reviewed here). Her writing is distinguished by ambitious scope and aesthetic innovation, tackling political themes and writing across a broad range of subjects and genres. Intertwining intimate domestic dramas with grand-scale, seismic shifts in cosmic balance, several of Gee’s novels imagine global disaster, apocalyptic futures and environmental catastrophes. Meanwhile, Gee is also concerned with exploring issues of racism, prejudice, cultural difference and class inequalities. Her body of work confronts political attitudes in contemporary Britain through satire, comedy, family saga, thriller and romance.

An edited collection with a foreword by Gee, Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, is already contracted to be published as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). If you'd like any further information, please see the conference blog, or visit the facebook page.

You can view the Prezi slides from my own paper, "Discarding the Nets of History: Pastoral Post-Apocalypticism in Maggie Gee's The Flood."

I've been invited as a plenary speaker to the forthcoming conference "Will Self and the Art of the Contemporary," to be held at the University of Roehampton on Saturday 1st December 2012. See here for the call for papers.

After an invigorating MA class on Will Self's The Book of Dave (Viking Press, 2006) as part of Lincoln's optional module on London Now (part of the department's ground-breaking MA in Twenty-First Century Literature), I couldn't resist spending some more time interrogating Self's pastiche of the genres of London satire and post-apocalyptic projection. Indebted to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (Jonathan Cape, 1980), The Book of Dave invokes a generic tradition stretching back to William Morris’ post-revolutionary meadows and villages in News from Nowhere (1890), Richard Jefferies’ gleeful devastation of the city in After London; or, Wild England (1885), and the swamps and marshes of J. G. Ballard’s ecocatastrophe The Drowned World (1962).

It is my argument that Self’s post-apocalyptic “Arcadian revenge,” however, asserts a (critical) utopian chronotope in the pastoral backwater of the island of Ham – “an island of the blessed” replete with simple agricultural labour, the shepherding of an innocent, sensual breed of genetically-engineered human-animal hybrids known as “motos,” and religious worship. As the futuristic, postdiluvian location of Hampstead Heath, the island of Ham conglutinates this little agrarian commonwealth with present-day Dave’s own nostalgic analepses of prelapsarian childhood simplicity; as well as his step-son Carl’s memories of the “affectionate enclosure” of childhood, before he was “expelled from Arcadia.”

This paper was presented at the Birkbeck Symposium on Contemporary British Fiction in May 2012, organised by Tony Venezia and Bianca Leggett.

Here's the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the talk:

On Friday 18th May I'll be joining the Guardian Higher Education Network for their weekly Live Chat blog. This week's discussion will be focused around "How to be a good lecturer" and I'll be posting as well as answering any questions.

You can join the chat from 12:00 to 14:00pm (BST) at the Guardian HE Network page.