Summary
Dr Stewart Mottram is a Senior Lecturer specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century literature, history, and culture. He has published widely on religious violence and vandalism in seventeenth-century England and Wales and his current research interests combine environmental humanities and medical humanities approaches to writing, water, and wellbeing in the literature of Andrew Marvell and his contemporaries.
His latest book – Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell – is published by Oxford University Press (2019). His most recent research on medical cures for malaria in seventeenth-century England - first reported in The Observer (August 2020) - is now available to read open access in The Seventeenth Century (2021) - ‘A most excellent medicine’: Malaria, Mithridate, and the Death of Andrew Marvell. Mottram is currently working on a book-length project on parasites in early modern England. He is fellow of the RSA and Higher Education Academy and is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.
Mottram is currently Research Director in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and American Studies where he also co-directs two Faculty Research Centres - the Cultures of Incarceration Centre, and the Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing.
Mottram is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures, hosted by the University of Hull's Energy & Environment Institute. The Centre pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area – the ‘green-blue humanities’ – equipping a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward and transform our understanding of humanity's relationships with water in the green-blue regions of the world, past, present and future.
Mottram has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2008-10) and AHRC (2014-15), and currently leads an AHRC/XR Stories Creative Industries project combining disciplinary and industry expertise to virtually recreate a seventeenth-century flood of Hull. Mottram is also co-investigator on the AHRC project, 'Risky Cities: Living with Water in an Uncertain Future Climate’, a 24-month AHRC-funded project learning from the past to build climate awareness today and for the future. Working with project partners including the National Youth Theatre, Absolutely Cultured and the Living with Water Partnership, the project explores Hull’s 800-year history of flooding and use arts and heritage interventions to engage diverse communities in building flood resilience.