English and Creative Writing

Photo of Professor Laura Salisbury

Professor Laura Salisbury

Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities

L.A.Salisbury@exeter.ac.uk

5480

01392 725480

Overview

I am Professor in Modern Literature and Medical Humanities. My room is 119 in the Queen's Building.

I have research and teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language.

I have published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, including a monograph entitled Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).  From 2020-2023, I was President of the Samuel Beckett Society. My research has also been centrally concerned with the relationship between modernism, modernity, and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. 

I sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of Beckett Studies, Medical Humanities, and the Psychoanalytic Horizons book series (Bloomsbury).

I work in the English Department and in the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Heath.

With Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck) I am joint PI on a 5-year Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award called 'Waiting Times' (2017-2023). This project is working to uncover what it means to wait in and for healthcare. I am writing a monograph called Between-time Stories: British States of Waiting on postwar to contemporary expriences of delayed and impeded time. 

From 2023 onwards, I will be working as a Co-Invesitgator on a new Wellcome-funded Discovery Award called 'After the End: Lived Experiences and Aftermaths of Diseases, Disasters and Drugs in Global Health'. The project is led by Prof Patricia Kingori (Oxford) and I will be examining the temporal narratives used to frame global health crises and what emerges in their wake.

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Research

My research interests are in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernist poetry; critical theory; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; gender and language; neuroscience and language; the question of evidence.



Research collaborations

WIth Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck), Jocelyn Catty (Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust), Michael Flexer (Exeter), Martin Moore (Exeter) and Raluca Soreanu (Birkbeck) I am part of a Wellcome Funded Collaborative Award, 'Waiting Times', to research the experience of waiting in healthcare.

From 2023 onwards, I will be working as a Co-Invesitgator on a new Wellcome-funded Discovery Award called 'After the End: Lived Experiences and Aftermaths of Diseases, Disasters and Drugs in Global Health'. The project is led by Prof Patricia Kingori (Oxford) and I will be examining the temporal narratives used to frame global health crises and what emerges in their wake.

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Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students working in the following areas: modernism (broadly, but particularly Samuel Beckett); interdisciplinary approaches to literature and neuroscience; medical humanities (particularly questions of time and care); psyshcoanalysis and literature; modernism and critical theory; literature and ethics; literature, temporality and affect.

Please feel free to email if you would like to discuss your prospective project informally.  

Research students

Current Students

2022 Tsai Tan-hsin, co-supervisor, ‘Temporal Comedy: Samuel Beckett’s Humour’

2021 Harry Caton, first supervisor, ‘The Disabled Poster Child’ (College of Humanities Funded)

2021 Anetta Pangaia, co-supervisor, ‘Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Narrative'

2018 Kelechi Anucha, first supervisor, ‘Waiting and End of Life Narratives’ (Wellcome funded)

2018 Farah Nada, co-supervisor, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Heterotopias’

Students supervised to completion

2022 Joseph Holloway, first supervisor, ‘Self, Self and Other: Conjoinment and Singleton Identity in Literature and Medicine, 1830-present’ (Exeter)

2022 Chao Long Jin, co-supervisor, ‘Holistic Modernism: Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychology’ (Exeter)

2022 Veronica Heney, co-supervisor, ‘Literatures of Self Harm’ (Wellcome funded) (Exeter)

2020 Alex Osborne, co-supervisor, ‘Anxiety in Contemporary Fiction’, (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Bristol/Exeter)

2020 Jackie Hopson, first supervisor, ‘The Psychiatrist in Fiction’ (Exeter)

2019 Ana Tomcic, co-supervisor, ‘Gods and Goods' (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Exeter/Cardiff)

2019 Imola Negy-Seres, co-supervisor, ‘Empathy in Modernist and Contemporary Fiction’ (Exeter)

2018 Emma Geen, co-supervisor, ‘Stories in the Skin’ (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Exeter/Bath Spa)

2018 Rachel Murray, co-supervisor, 'The Modernist Exoskeleton: Wyndham Lewis, D H Lawrence, HD, Samuel Beckett' (AHRC-funded) (Bristol/Exeter)

2017 Joshua Powell, first supervsor, 'Perception, Affect, Imagery: Beckett and Psychological Experimentation' (Exeter)

2016 Richard Carter, second supervisor ‘Digital Literature’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2016 Sophia David, second supervisor, ‘Eco-Criticism and Contemporary Fiction’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2015 Oliver Evans, ‘What Can’t be Coded can be Decorded: Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake’, co-supervisor (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2015 Hannah Proctor, first supervisor, ‘Russian Revolutionary Psychology’ (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2015 Laura Seymour, co-supervisor, ‘Shakespeare and Neuroscience’ (Birkbeck)

2015 Elizabeth Micakovic, first supervisor, ‘T S Eliot’s Voice:  A Cultural History’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2014 Robert Kiely, first supervisor, ‘Beckett and Mysticism’ (Birkbeck)

2014 Isabelle Zahar, co-supervisor, ‘Discourses of Love in the Western Canon’ (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2013 William Kherbek, co-supervisor, ‘John Ashbery and Cognitive Poetics’ (Birkbeck)

2013 Sean Roberts, first supervisor, ‘Beckett and Levinasian Ethics’ (Birkbeck)

2012 Jamie Wood, first spervisor, ‘The Eye Under the Duck-board: English Modernism, The First World War and the Body’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2012 Cathryn Setz, co-supervisor, ‘Transitive Birds: Non-mammalian Animals and Late Modernist Aesthetics in transition, 1927–1938’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2010 Melissa Bradshaw, co-suprvisor, ‘Plath, Bishop and Psychoanalytic Discourses of Suicide’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2006 Richard Cope, ‘Beckett’s Three Dialogues and Contemporary Painting’ (Southbank University) 

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Publications

Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.

| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2008 | 2006 | 2005 | 2002 | 2001 |

2024

  • Salisbury L. (2024) Waiting with Beckett in the Anthropocene, Journal of Beckett Studies.

2023

  • Bastian M, Flatø EH, Baraitser L, Jordheim H, Salisbury L, van Dooren T. (2023) Ethical conference economies? Reimagining the costs of convening academic communities when moving online, The Geographical Journal, DOI:10.1111/geoj.12557. [PDF]
  • Salisbury L. (2023) Grey Time: Anchromism and Waiting for Beckett, Grey on Grey: At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art, Edinburgh University Press, 53-86, DOI:10.1515/9781474478533-006.
  • Anucha K. (2023) Out of Time: Temporality, Form and Fugitive Care in Contemporary Literature and Culture.
  • McGonagle P. (2023) "Disinheritance" : identity constructions in the prose works and archives of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
  • McGonagle P. (2023) "Disinheritance" : identity constructions in the prose works and archives of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
  • Salisbury L, Baraitser L, Catty J, Anucha K, Davies S, Flexer M, Moore MD, Osserman J. (2023) A waiting crisis?, The Lancet, volume 401, pages 428-429.
  • Holloway J. (2023) Self, Self & Other: Conjoinment and Singleton Identity in Literature and Medicine 1830-Present.

2022

  • Salisbury L, Baraitser L. (2022) Chiasmic Time: Being-in-time in Time Being, Time Being: A Film by Ruairí Corr and Deborah Robinson, 15-24.
  • Salisbury L. (2022) Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett in the Time of Climate Catastrophe, Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe, Palgrave Macmillan, 155-174.
  • Salisbury L. (2022) ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality, Geo: Geography and Environment, DOI:10.1002/geo2.114.
  • Heney V. (2022) Our stories, our selves: Fictional representations of self-harm.
  • Salisbury L. (2022) On not being able to read: doomscrolling and anxiety in pandemic times, Textual Practice, volume 37, no. 6, pages 887-918, DOI:10.1080/0950236x.2022.2056767. [PDF]
  • Jin UC-L. (2022) Holistic Modernism: Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychology.

2021

2020

2019

  • Salisbury L. (2019) Of Babies and Bombs: Reuben Mednikoff's 'The Anatomy of Space', A Tale of Mother's Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism, De La Warr Pavillion and Camden Arts Centre, 123-127.
  • Nagy-Seres I. (2019) Intimate Encounters: Sympathy in the Modernist and Contemporary Novel.
  • Salisbury LA. (2019) 'Beckett's Disabled Language', The New Samuel Beckett Studies, Cambridge University Press, 195-214.

2018

  • Hinchliffe S, Jackson M, Wyatt K, Barlow A, Barreto M, Clare L, Deplege M, Durie R, Fleming L, Groom N. (2018) Healthy publics: Enabling cultures and environments for health, Palgrave Communications, volume 4, pages n/a-n/a, article no. 57 (2018), DOI:10.1057/s41599-018-0113-9.
  • Salisbury LA. (2018) Psychoanalysis and Other Psychologies, The Bloomsbury Companion to Literary Modernism, Bloomsbury Academic, 285-306.
  • Salisbury LA. (2018) Aphasic Modernism: Languages for Illness from a Confusion of Tongues, The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh University Press, 444-462, DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0025.

2017

  • Salisbury LA. (2017) 'I Switch Off': Beckett, Bion, and Thinking in Torturous Times, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, volume 29.2, pages 51-65.

2016

  • Salisbury L, Barry E, Maude U. (2016) Introduction: Beckett, Medicine and the Brain, Journal of Medical Humanities, volume 37.2, pages 127-135.
  • Salisbury LA. (2016) Relatable, Textual Practice: an international journal of radical literary studies, volume 30.7, pages 8-9.
  • Salisbury LA. (2016) Relatable, Textual Practice: an international journal of radical literary studies, volume 30.7, pages 8-9.
  • Salisbury LA, Code C. (2016) Jackson's Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language, Journal of Medical Humanities, article no. 10.1007/s10912-015-9375-z, DOI:10.1007/s10912-015-9375-z.
  • Salisbury LA. (2016) ’Etwas oder Nichts’: Beckett und die Materialität der Sprache, Null, Nichts und Negation. Beckett’s No-Thing, Transcript Verlag.

2015

  • Salisbury L, Sale S. (2015) Introduction, Kittler Now: New Perspectives in Kittler Studies, Polity, xiii-xxxvi.
  • Salisbury LA. (2015) Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s, The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, Bloomsbury Academic.
  • Proctor H, Salisbury LA. (2015) The History of a Brain Wound: Alexander Luria and the Dialectics of Soviet Plasticity, Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject, Fordham University Press, 159-193, DOI:10.1515/9780823266166.
  • Sale S, Salisbury L. (2015) Kittler Now Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies, John Wiley & Sons.

2014

  • Salisbury LA. (2014) Out of a Handkerchief, Critical Quarterly, volume 56, no. 2, pages 1-10, article no. 1.
  • Salisbury LA. (2014) Out of a Handkerchief, Critical Quarterly, volume 56, no. 2, pages 1-10.
  • Salisbury LA. (2014) Gloria SMH and Beckett’s Linguistic Encryptions, The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 153-169.

2013

  • Salisbury LA. (2013) Psychology, Beckett in Context, Cambridge University Press, 312-323.
  • Salisbury LA. (2013) Resistances: Beckett's Language of Power in War and Peace, Times Literary Supplement.

2012

  • Salisbury L. (2012) Transpositions: The Noise of Life Signs, Transpositions / Deborah Robinson, University of Plymouth Press, 40-46.
  • Salisbury LA. (2012) Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing, Edinburgh University Press.

2011

  • Salisbury LA. (2011) Linguistic Trepanation: Brain Damage, Penetrative Seeing, and the Revolution of the Word, Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930, Palgrave Macmillan, 179-208.
  • Salisbury LA. (2011) Bulimic Beckett: Food for Thought and the Archive of Analysis, Critical Quarterly, volume 3, no. 53, pages 60-80.

2010

  • Salisbury L, Shail A. (2010) Introduction, Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, Palgrave, 1-40.
  • Salisbury L. (2010) Cognitive Studies and Evolutionary Literary Theory, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, Blackwell.
  • Salisbury LA. (2010) "Something or Nothing”: Beckett and the Matter of Language, Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett, Manchester University Press, 213-236.
  • Salisbury LA. (2010) Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity, Neurology and Modernity, Palgrave Macmillan, 204-230.
  • Salisbury LA. (2010) Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue, Textual Practice: an international journal of radical literary studies, volume 5, no. 24, pages 883-912.
  • Salisbury LA. (2010) Art of Noise: Beckett’s Language in a Culture of Information, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: annual bilingual review, no. 22, pages 355-372.
  • Salisbury L, Shail A. (2010) Neurology and Modernity, Palgrave Macmillan.

2008

  • Salisbury LA. (2008) "Throw up for Good”: Gagging, Compulsion and a Comedy of Ethics in the Trilogy, Beckett and Ethics, Continuum, 163-180.
  • Salisbury LA. (2008) "What Is the Word”: Beckett’s Aphasic Modernism, The Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 17, pages 80-128.

2006

  • Salisbury LA. (2006) Michel Serres: Science, Fiction, and the Shape of the Relation, Science Fiction Studies, no. 33, pages 30-52.

2005

  • Salisbury LA. (2005) Beside Oneself: Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude, no. 11, pages 81-92.

2002

  • Salisbury LA. (2002) Laughing Matters: The Comic Timing of Irish Joking, Comedy, Fantasy, and Colonialism, Continuum, 158-174.
  • Caselli D, Connor S, Salisbury L. (2002) Other Becketts, Journal of Beckett Studies Books.

2001

  • Salisbury LA. (2001) “So the unreasoning goes”: Comic Timing and Trembling in Ill Seen Ill Said, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: annual bilingual review, no. 11, pages 372-382.

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Teaching

I have teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language. 

Modules taught

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Biography

After studying for a BA in English and European Literature at Warwick University, I completed an MA in the Theory and Practice of Modern Fiction at Exeter University in 1996. Following this, I studied for a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, which I completed in 2003. From 2003-7, I was a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, and was then awarded an RCUK Fellowship in Science, Techology and Culture (2007-13). In 2013, I became Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

During my time at Birkbeck I became increasingly interested in Medical Humanities and worked with my colleague Joanne Winning to set up a new MA in Medical Humanities, taught in association with the Kent, Sussex and Surrey NHS Deanery. In 2013, I was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Literature at Exeter University and am now Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities. 

I am part of the first generation of my family to sudy at university.

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