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Shane McCorristine BA MA PhD F.R.Hist.S.

IRCHSS CARA Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Interdisciplinary historian with interests in cultural, social, literary, and environmental history, focusing on the intangible, the supernatural, and the disembodied as expressed and understood in different historical contexts and under different frames of meaning.

Biography

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Research

'Supernatural and Disembodied Experience in Ninteenth-Century Narratives of Arctic Exploration'

This cultural history seriously re-thinks our knowledge of Arctic experience by investigating the debates surrounding the legitimacy of supernatural and disembodied knowledge as they were manifested in narratives, speculations, imaginings, and other Victorian representations of Arctic exploration. The traumatic disappearance of the Franklin expedition (1845-48) caused the British public to engage with the disembodied categories of the supernatural and the spiritual in an effort to imagine and reconstruct what happened, and perhaps to make direct contact, physically or spiritually, with the lost sailors. This drive, building upon earlier aesthetic and psuedo-scientific conventions, manifested itself in a variety of 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' ways, from naval expeditions to spiritualist séances to romantic poetry. In his 1875 epitaph to John Franklin, Tennyson invoked these categories when declaring that Franklin's soul was heading "Towards no earthly pole".

Historians have traditionally misdiagnosed the notion of an 'Arctic otherworld' as a sign of Victorian sentimentalism rather than taking seriously its implications for understanding the Arctic as a landscape rich with meanings of place. Building on recent research into the power of the ghostly in formatting Victorian debates about mind and modernity, this project will examine for the first time how 'dreamscaping' was a central component of how Victorians understood 'Arctic place'. How were ideas of the Arctic as a dream-world, where one could become disembodied, articulated? Taking account of the profound meanings of suffering associated with Arctic exploration, how did embodied and disembodied emotional expressions come to be manifested alongside the physical problems of starvation and disease? To what extent did such expressions attempt to appeal to indigenous spirits and ontologies? This project will formulate answers to these questions by examining C19 official, popular, and ephemeral narratives about Arctic exploration, chiefly from Britain, but also integrating some North American and Scandinavian narratives for comparative purposes. Through this process of archival research, the dreamscapes that made up the European and American Arctic imaginations will be interpreted from multiple ontological perspectives and a much fuller historical cross-cultural understanding of the Arctic as inhabited by human and non-human spirits can be achieved.

Publications

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Peer-reviewed journal articles

Contributions to edited volumes equivalent to peer-reviewed journals

Other publications (journals without peer review, book reviews, review essays)

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External activities