PhD in English Literature/Cultural History, Birkbeck College, University of London (awarded 2006)
MA in English Literary Research, Birkbeck College, University of London (2000)
BA English Literature, Bath Spa University (1st class) (1999)
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Life Writing, Oral History, Reading, Environmental crisis, Activism, Memory
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Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History Shelley Trower Sound Writing Voices Authors and Readers of Oral History, 2023 For all its orality, oral history has a long-standing, closely entwined relationship with writing. Sound Writing considers the interplay between sound recordings and written literature, looking back to antiquity while focusing on the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It also refers to a dream of sound writing itself, enabling voices to reach readers directly, cutting out the need for authorial mediation. Oral histories are nevertheless actively mediated, often turned into and received as written texts. There can be value in transforming spoken oral histories in print or on screen, not least in order to make them “readable” for wider audiences. Indeed, such re-creations can be worthy and wonderful works of scholarship and art—and this book explores a wide range of different forms and media (like the polyphonic novel and hyperlinked websites) that can most effectively convey speakers’ narratives on their own terms—but there is also, always, the danger of speakers’ voices being distorted or lost in the process of mediation. This book examines how oral histories are co-created, by speakers, by authors, and also by readers. It considers how oral history can inform our understandings of authorship and reading, to reconceive and query their potential as creative, multiple, collective, and activist. Finally, it reflects on the role of authorship in the academy.
Reading, Race, and Remembering Childhood Abuse—Returning to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) Shelley Trower Life Writing, 2023 For many readers, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings stands out as a memorable, even life-changing book. Some readers have written autobiographically about reading this autobiographical text. In this essay, I look briefly at some of this writing about reading Angelou’s book, asking how it has affected different readers in the US and UK at different moments. For many, Angelou’s representation of Black experience in the American South, and of childhood sexual abuse, is crucial. I propose that for a reader such as myself, living in the wake of the widespread discrediting of ‘recovered memories’ that emerged in the 1990s, I Know Why could serve to destabilise the boundary between uncontested childhood memories and discredited memories of abuse.
Vibrations Shelley Trower Sound and Literature, 2020 This chapter begins with a brief chronological outline of how vibrations figure in scientific and literary texts from the eighteenth-century to twentieth-century Modernism. It outlines approaches to the transmission of scientific and spiritualist concepts of vibratory energies and atoms through literature, going on to consider literary form and materiality as vibratory, focusing briefly on Conrad's work. Moving further beyond the confines of literary periods, it then relates analysis of literature in its material forms to the work of music and sound studies scholars who are interested in the materiality of sound as vibration, focusing initially on contemporary bass music, and how it can affect its audience palpably and without linguistic signification. This latter area of research provides pointers for how literary approaches might engage with the materiality of texts and of reading/listening experiences, and, further, with an expanded sense of sound as a form of vibration that extends into the 'infrasensory' and operates both within and beyond discourse. The chapter goes on to use Dickens's fiction to bring together approaches to textual, phenomenological and ontological vibrations. In its sonorous materiality, Dickens's fiction records an experience of railway vibrations for its readers, while it also conveys a sense of their existence as borderline infrasound and of vibrations that escape perception and discourse.
Tomboys and Girly Boys in George Eliot's Early Fiction Shelley Trower Victorian Novel and Masculinity, 2015 With her cropped hair, cleverness and hatred of wearing pretty dresses, Maggie Tulliver is clearly frustrated with the role of being a little girl. To her mother’s and aunts’ disgust, she seems to find it impossible to remain clean and quiet, or to turn her black matted hair into the blonde curls successfully achieved by her obedient cousin Lucy. Critics have identified this early George Eliot heroine as an autobiographical depiction of the author’s own difficulty with and rejection of femininity. Feminist critics in particular have focused on The Mill on the Floss (1860) as a portrait of struggling womanhood in a culture in which women were denied opportunities of education and occupation.1 Maggie cannot access the education that seems wasted on her brother Tom, who, despite being less clever, is able to exploit opportunities to become ‘gentlemanly’.
Vibratory modernism A. Enns, S. Trower Vibratory Modernism, 2013 Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that show how vibrations provide a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate in the nineteenth and early t
Introduction Anthony Enns, Shelley Trower Vibratory Modernism, 2013 Vibrations were central to some of the major developments in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science. The idea that the universe was suffused by an invisible 'ether' supported the idea that all phenomena, including sound, light, and even matter itself, consisted of vibrations of varying frequencies. Experiments in physics and physiology also revealed the existence of vibrations beyond the thresholds of human perception, such as X-rays and radio waves, and people suddenly became aware that the environment around them was saturated with invisible and inaudible vibrations. The discovery of these extrasensory vibrations seemed to provide a plausible scientific explanation for psychic and occult phenomena, such as telepathy and communication with the dead. The fact that new media technologies like photography, phonography, and wireless telegraphy were shown to be capable of capturing and recording these extrasensory vibrations encouraged speculation as to their potential applications in psychical research and spiritualist séances. The scientific study of vibrations thus introduced a new understanding of space, matter, energy, perception, and consciousness that dramatically changed the way people thought about themselves and the world around them.KeywordsPresidential AddressElectric TheoryPhilosophical MagazineEnglish PhysicistPsychic PhenomenonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
