Professor Sharon Ruston

Chair in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

• Crescent House 501
• T: 0161 295 5071
• E: s.ruston@salford.ac.uk
• Twitter: @sharonruston
• SEEK: Research profile

I joined the University of Salford in 2009 after working at the universities of Keele (2006-2009) and Bangor (2000-2006).

Undergraduate Modules:

The Romantic Period

Green Writing

Monstrous Bodies

MA module:

Literature in the Academic and Cultural Worlds

PhD supervision:

Alison Morgan, ‘P. B. Shelley’s Popular Songs’ (2009-12)

Wahida Amin, ‘Science and Poetry: The Case of Humphry Davy’ (AHRC Funded; 2009-12)

Jessica Evans, ‘Vitalism in the Periodical Press’ (2010-13) 

Jennifer Morgan, ‘Transmission and Reception of P. B. Shelley in Working-Class Journals’ (AHRC Funded; 2010-13)

My main research interests are in the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820.

My first book, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), explored the medical and scientific contexts that inform Shelley’s concept of vitality in his major poetry. Recently I have been working on Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest in natural history, William Godwin’s interest in mesmerism, and Humphry Davy’s writings on the sublime; these topics form chapters in my next book, called Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s, which is coming out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2013.

I have also begun preliminary work on a Collected Edition of Humphry Davy and his Circle’s letters, with a team of Davy scholars including Professor Frank James (Royal Institution), Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), Professor Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) and Professor David Knight (University of Durham). We have recently secured funding from the British Society for the History of Science, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, and the Wellcome Trust. See the Davy Letters website, here.

I was the lead-investigator on the AHRC doctoral training programme, ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine’. From 2009 to 2011 the University of Salford delivered training in collaboration with eleven other partners: the Universities of Keele, Leicester, Manchester, King’s College London and the London Consortium, and the Science Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Wellcome Library. The LitSciMed website can be found here.

To listen to my podcast on the Aeolian harp, click here.

See my inaugural lecture (given at the University of Salford, 22nd February 2011), here.

2009–present I am one of two essay prize judges for the annual Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Prize (http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/noticeboard.html#top).

I would be particularly interested in applications from PhD students in the following areas: Romantic-period literature, especially poetry; literature, science and medicine in the nineteenth century.

Qualifications:

University of Liverpool

1995–99        Ph.D. thesis, ‘P. B. Shelley and the Science of Life’

1994–95        M.A. degree in English Renaissance and Romantic Literature

1991–94        B.A. (hons) degree in English Language and Literature (First Class)

University of Wales, Bangor

2003        Postgraduate Certificate of Teaching in Higher Education (Distinction)

Memberships:

2011-present Member of the Executive Committee of the British Society for Literature and Science

British Association for Romantic Studies

2007–2009 Vice-President of BARS

1999–2007: Treasurer and Membership Secretary of BARS

1998–2005: Creator and moderator of the original BARS website (www.bars.ac.uk) and the BARS electronic listserv

2010-present Fellow of the English Association

MONOGRAPHS

            Published

• Shelley and Vitality, monograph (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2005), ISBN 1403918244, 229pp; reissued in paperback, July 2012, ISBN 9781137011121
• Romanticism, Introductions to British Literature and Culture series (Continuum Press, 2007), ISBN 082648882X, 165pp.

Forthcoming

• Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine in the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2013).

JOURNAL ARTICLES/ CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

            Published

• ‘Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists’, in Liberating Medicine, ed. by Tristanne Connolly and Stephen Clark, Enlightenment and the World Series (Pickering and Chatto, 2009)
• ‘Teaching Gender and Sexuality’, in Teaching Romanticism, Teaching the New English Series, ed. David Higgins and Sharon Ruston (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
• ‘Natural Rights and Natural History in Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft’, Essays and Studies, ed. by Sharon Ruston, 61 (2008), 53–71
•  Shelley’s Links to the Midlands’ Enlightenment: Adam Walker and James Keir’, special edition of the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30: 2 (July 2007), 227–242
• ‘Vegetarianism and Vitality in the Work of Thomas Forster, William Lawrence and P. B. Shelley’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 54 (2005), 113–32
•  ‘“Natural enemies in science, as well as in politics”: Romanticism and scientific conflict’, Romanticism, 11.1 (2005), 70–83
• ‘Resurrecting Frankenstein’, Keats-Shelley Review, 19 (2005), 97–116
• ‘One of the “Modern Sceptics”: Reappraising Shelley’s Medical Education’, Romanticism, 9.1 (2003), 1–19

Forthcoming

• ‘“What was I?” Frankenstein, Natural History, and the Question of What it Means to be Human’, La Questione Romantica, 3:1 (April 2013)
• ‘Has man “paid too dear a price for his empire”? Monsters in Romantic-era literature’, in Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Germany, Series Acume 2 - Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, forthcoming 2013)
• ‘“High” Romanticism: Literature and Drugs’, The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (OUP, forthcoming 2014)
• ‘Sir Humphry Davy, Poetry and Nitrous Oxide’, The Lancet (forthcoming 2014).

EDITED COLLECTIONS

Published

• Special Issue of Romanticism, guest edited by Sharon Ruston, on Thomas de Quincey, 17 (2011)
• Teaching Romanticism, Teaching the New English Series, ed. David Higgins and Sharon Ruston (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
• ‘Literature and Science’, special edition of Essays and Studies, ed. by Sharon Ruston, 61 (2008), including ‘Introduction, pp. 1–13
• The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, ed. by Sharon Ruston (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), including ‘Introduction’, pp. xv–xxiv

 Ongoing: Editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle (consultancy group: Professors Tim Fulford, Frank James, Jan Golinski, David Knight): http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/