Department of English
Research subject: Posthuman Intimacy: Birds in the Discourse of Love of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford
Supervisor: Dr. Ruben Borg
Abstract: In my doctoral dissertation I look at how early 20th-century British writers employ bird imagery to define love. Using three points of focus - bird song, bird movement, and nesting - I examine how D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford renounce romantic conventions in favor of a "nonhuman love" inspired by bird courtship rituals and behaviors. By working at the intersection of literary modernism, critical animal studies, ornithology, and philosophies of love, I hope to gain a fresh perspective on these canonical writers, which feeds into contemporary discourse both on the posthuman and on the dissolution of the Victorian courtship plot in modernist fiction.
President Stipend 2017/18