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Literature and Time

Elizabeth Barry

Elizabeth Barry is interested in the psychology, neurobiology and philosophy of time, and how these approaches might inform readings of literary time. She is working on a monograph on ageing and embodied time, investigating the conspicuous absence of ageing and old age in philosophies of lived time and embodiment, and developing a phenomenological framework with which to read ageing in literature. This work engages with ideas of contingency, expectation, finitude, and the time of (institutional and intersubjective) care. As part of this work, she is thinking about the problems of retention and protention in dementia, and working with psychiatrists, gerontologists and artists to explore interventions (including music and laughter) that address this debilitating loss of temporal capacity. She organized the second event of the 'Time and Temporality' network, a workshop on Temporality, Medicine and the Mind, at Warwick in June 2014, and an AHRC-funded symposium on Ageing, Embodiment and the Self in May 2016. She is an international partner on the Historicizing the Ageing Self project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and based at the Universiry of Bergen, and is organizing a symposium on Living a Good Life in Older Age in July 2018, funded by the project. She tweets on topics related to literature, theory and time with the hashtag #littheorytime.

Christina Lupton
Christina Lupton is interested in a range of issues and theories involving the interface of media and time, and in the politics, more generally, of how people use, divide up, and share time. Her forthcoming book, Reading Codex and the Making of Time, looks at the way that readers in the eighteenth century shaped their lives to fit their books, and their books to fit their lives. It asks more generally after the way that two historical phenomena converged: that of more people become extensive readers of print, and that of more people having less time of their own. Theoretically, it leans on Kittler's Media Theory and Luhmann's System's Theory to explore these issues. A recent article "Immersing the Network in Time," (ELH, Summer 2016) introduces one part of the project.

In association with this project, she's organised two workshops, one on Reading and Time, and one on Contingency and Literature: https://litandcontingencywordpresscom.wordpress.com She also sits on the board of the English Institute (http://englishinstitute.yale.edu), which is currently hosting its annual workshops in the US based on themes around time and scale. She has supervised PHD and MA students interested in questions of media and time in contemporary and historical literature.
Gill Partington

Gill Partington’s work addresses the intersections of time and media. She has published a chapter on the conflicting temporalities of films and books in the work of British Artist John Latham, and her current research into artists books examines how non-codex book forms might produce alternative temporalities of reading and interacting with the page.

She has also been involved in a Wellcome-funded Medical Humanities project entitled Waiting Times, based at Birkbeck College. As research fellow she investigated emerging concepts of time in the field of end-of-life care and chronic illness, as well as co-organising an interdisciplinary symposium on the theme of ‘the chronic’ as a concept that is shaping the temporality of contemporary culture in a broad sense. She also has an article (currently in publication) about the protracted time of care and illness in Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg.


Events and Conferences

Living a Good Life in Older Age, 5th-6th July 2018, Milburn House, University of Warwick


Teaching and Pedagogy

EN377 Literature, Theory, Time