About the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures
The University of Hull's Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area, the ‘green-blue humanities.’
It equips a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward, transforming our understanding of our relationships with water and shaping future research agendas, methods, and approaches within and between disciplines.
Join our webinar – Thursday 11 March 2021
We are hosting a free webinar to help you find out more about funded postgraduate research at the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures. Join us to hear from programme leaders, supervisors, students and researchers and ask any burning questions at the Q&A. Register here
About this project
This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious, talented and enthusiastic researcher to conduct interdisciplinary research in order to advance thinking within the area of blue-green humanities through offering innovative new perspectives on writing in British/Irish estuary regions between 1500-1700.
Access to clean water is today regarded as a basic human right, but the literary and social history of early modern Britain suggests this was not always the case. Despite developing connections in early modern writing between water, wellbeing, and the health benefits of spa resorts, many urban centres in this period lacked the infrastructure and awareness to ensure clean water supply. These problems were particularly acute for estuary communities like London and Hull, prone to salt-water flooding and salinization of fresh water supply, and at risk from water- and insect-borne diseases. The geography of estuaries therefore makes them ideal case studies for investigating how water and wellbeing helped shape cultures and communities across Britain and Ireland.
This project adopts interdisciplinary approaches to water and wellbeing and applies these to English plays, poems, or prose writings written in British/Irish estuary regions between 1500-1700. The project will combine methodologies drawn from the environmental and medical humanities and adopt inclusive and/or global approaches to offer innovative new perspectives on writing from More to Shakespeare, Marvell to Katherine Philips. Applicants will also wish to consider how findings from the past can help estuary communities learn resilience today, in the face of climate-related emergencies that pose risks to water sanitation and supply.