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Professor Marty Gould of the Department of English awarded Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship
[09.02.2015]

TAMPA, Fla. -- Marty Gould has been awarded a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship, a two-year residential fellowship funded by the European Union. During the term of his fellowship, Gould will be in residence at Brunel University, outside London. Despite its name, the Marie Curie Fellowship supports researchers in all fields. The fellowship is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 plan, which includes €6.1 billion to support the movement of researchers to and from EU countries. Gould’s fellowship award supports the temporary relocation to the EU and includes a heavy emphasis on educational outreach and the public dissemination of research.

Gould’s research project considers adaptations—particularly dramatizations—of Charles Dickens's novels as key sites for international cultural interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing upon the latest developments in adaptation theory and pedagogy, the project views adaptations as expressions of critical interpretations of literary texts, which comment upon and translate those texts into new media, other languages and for consumption by a wide array of audiences. The project seeks to find fresh venues for researching Europe’s Dickens; new tools for locating, interpreting and disseminating work on Dickens and the 19th-century theatre; and ways of communicating emerging ideas about Dickens, 19th-century Europe, literary adaptation and cultural currency to audiences beyond the academy. This comparative and collaborative project develops a more complex understanding of remediations of Dickens and other 19th-century European novelists by resituating them within a multimedia and trans-cultural framework. The project includes a number of important deliverables across the two-year fellowship period, including a scholarly monograph, a series of public theatrical presentations, an international scholarly conference, a group of articles and an assortment of public and educational outreach activities.

Gould’s project charts a new interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to textual analysis, one that reintegrates literature with mass culture and that calls attention to literature in its trans-historical and global contexts. Though the project is focused on 19th-century dramatizations, it links to scholarship on modern film and international media studies at key points, reconnecting work on modern media and popular culture with literary history and the theatrical archive. The project unites very current scholarly interests and propels them forward with new energies by engaging broader publics through classroom instruction and interactive community activities:

• to identify the place of Dickens within European literary and visual culture across time
• to develop new models for approaching theatrical adaptation as trans-national translation and to understand remediation as a vehicle for the international circulation of literary texts
• to understand how visual media and performance interpret and engage the public with literary texts
• to develop and disseminate new methods for integrating adaptation and performance into the study of literature so as to relocate the mission of English as the development of active and cultural literacies
• to employ the latest methods in literary and cultural studies to develop new models for engaging the public with the humanities through the dissemination of publicly relevant research and the promotion of broader cultural literacies.

The first of the project’s public outreach activities is already in progress. Brunel University’s theatre department is preparing a series of performances of plays drawn from Dickens: a pair of dramatizations of “A Christmas Carol” will be performed this December, followed by a production of “No Thoroughfare” in spring 2016.

Filed under:English Arts and Sciences Faculty Awards   
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