The researcher’s first book, Narrative, Catastrophe in Historicity in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (2022) explored the way in which communities tell and re-tell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival. It approached this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly “modern” national history was being elaborated. While researching the representations of Babel, the Great Flood, the Fall of Rome, and natural disasters which writers deployed to imagine the possible return of a barbaric “Dark Ages”, a metaphor connoting slower and less spectacular change repeatedly appeared. This was the image of barbarism as rust, gradually eating away at civilised and “polished” nations. From this observation the project “Rust and Revolution: Understanding Social Technologies in Enlightenment Europe through metaphorology” developed. RUSTEE embraces literary and philosophical history, scientific controversy, revolutionary politics, conflict and expansion in the colonial Atlantic, and antiquarian and museum history. The project is able to take such a broad multi-perspectival view of Anglo- and Francophone culture by staying always on the trail of rust, whether as chemical mystery, technical problem, or metaphor.
The use of rust as a metaphor for civilisational decline is ancient, dating back to the Hebrew Bible, but flourished into a wide variety of new expressions during the eighteenth century. RUSTEE aims, first, at understanding the way in which concepts related to Time and Civilisation were crafted – and not simply "expressed" – through metaphor. It is allied with theories of metaphor which maintain that concepts are not pure abstract ideas which are then decoratively enhanced with rhetorical features drawing on the material world, but that analogies taken from the sensed world are fundamental to the development of concepts. Second, RUSTEE aims to test theories (as developed by Bruno Latour and New Materialists) which place humans together in networks with non-human "actors", and which understand agency as shared among all such actors (and not confined to the self-conscious human). It asks in what ways such networks might account for, and include, metaphors and concepts. This goes beyond simply tracing new expressions of the rust metaphor to new scientific ideas or technical innovations: it asks in turn how the metaphoric life of rust influenced interactions with material rust.
The deliverables/outputs of this research are single-authored publications, intended to form the basis of an eventual monograph (to be produced in the years after the end of the grant period).
