Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COASTAL ROUTES (Travel, Environment, Sustainability: A Literary and Cultural History of Irish and Scottish Coastal Routes)
Période du rapport: 2020-09-01 au 2022-08-31
COASTAL ROUTES is a timely project in our contemporary moment of environmental change and climate crisis as rising sea levels and flooding, coastal erosion and loss of habitats are transforming the Atlantic coastlines. The project asked how the recovery of an historical archive of travel texts about Ireland and Scotland’s Atlantic shorelines can speak to anticipated future developments in tourism by analysing the competing aesthetic and economic values attached to coastscapes.
Travel writing was the principal genre for representing the natural world during the Romantic period that offers the opportunity to unlock the tensions between aesthetic, economics, and natural heritage that often remain hidden in other genres. Examination of dominant narratives as expressed in travel texts, with their lasting relevance for today’s branding of coastal routes, offers new knowledge about the relationship between cultural heritage and environmental protection. The Romantic-era framing of the “wild” and “sublime” landscapes of the Highlands and coasts informs their interpretation even now, with Ireland’s 2,500-km coastal route marketed as the “Wild Atlantic Way” since 2014, followed shortly after by Scotland’s tourism strategy for the “North Coast 500”. By turning an EH lens on travel writing, COASTAL ROUTES counters the tendency to foreground nation-centred and imperial narratives, or Romantic aesthetics of nature and the sublime. The project advanced the field by addressing ideas of abundance, wilderness and waste, and their relation to contemporary concerns of sustainability, development, and natural heritage.
The primary research questions for this project were:
1. What can travel literature tell us about the relationship between people, place, and environment?
2. In what ways do travel narratives shape ecological awareness within the wider cultural and political context?
3. When did modern ideas of wilderness and uncultivated land take shape, and how do Scotland and Ireland differ on this front?
4. How does tourism, as an activity and an industry, conceptualise and shape the environment in these most western regions of the Atlantic archipelago?
Travel writing was the principal genre for representing the natural world during the Romantic period that offers the opportunity to unlock the tensions between aesthetic, economics, and natural heritage that often remain hidden in other genres. Examination of dominant narratives as expressed in travel texts, with their lasting relevance for today’s branding of coastal routes, offers new knowledge about the relationship between cultural heritage and environmental protection. The Romantic-era framing of the “wild” and “sublime” landscapes of the Highlands and coasts informs their interpretation even now, with Ireland’s 2,500-km coastal route marketed as the “Wild Atlantic Way” since 2014, followed shortly after by Scotland’s tourism strategy for the “North Coast 500”. By turning an EH lens on travel writing, COASTAL ROUTES counters the tendency to foreground nation-centred and imperial narratives, or Romantic aesthetics of nature and the sublime. The project advanced the field by addressing ideas of abundance, wilderness and waste, and their relation to contemporary concerns of sustainability, development, and natural heritage.
The primary research questions for this project were:
1. What can travel literature tell us about the relationship between people, place, and environment?
2. In what ways do travel narratives shape ecological awareness within the wider cultural and political context?
3. When did modern ideas of wilderness and uncultivated land take shape, and how do Scotland and Ireland differ on this front?
4. How does tourism, as an activity and an industry, conceptualise and shape the environment in these most western regions of the Atlantic archipelago?
COASTAL ROUTES enabled the experienced researcher, Dr Anna Pilz to undertake a 24-month fellowship at the University of Edinburgh to deliver a project on “Travel, Environment, Sustainability: A Literary and Cultural History of Irish and Scottish Coastal Routes’, under the supervision of Professor Penny Fielding (PF). Dr Pilz learnt new research-specific skills by working closely with the Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century network, and with academic experts in Environmental Humanities, Cultural Geography, and Irish Studies at Edinburgh. This mobility fellowship included a 3-month secondment at the Moore Institute, University of Galway, Ireland, where AP was supervised by Dr Nessa Cronin. The action enabled Dr Pilz to continue to enhance her research leadership by attending courses offered by UEDIN’s Institute for Academic Development as well as completing Advance HE’s Women in Leadership programme and training as a Writing Retreat Facilitator. These developments laid the foundations for her recruitment as Academic Developer & Trainer in Researcher Development with the IAD at Edinburgh.
During her fellowship, Dr. Pilz organised and convened a number of academic events and produced both academic and non-academic publications that were based on a series of academic conference and seminar presentations; she also had the pleasure of supervising MSc dissertation projects.
The results of this MSCA project have already been disseminated in form of a podcast with the artist Christina Riley for a non-academic audience (https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/In+Conversation+with+Christina+RileyA+Collecting%2C+Arranging+and+Sharing+the+Coast/1_y2wxo9rn/48781431)(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), a co-authored blog post for Rachel Carson Center’s “Seeing the Woods” series (https://seeingthewoods.org/2021/06/28/the-great-blasket-island-storytelling-and-the-environment/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) as well as an edited Special Issue for Nineteenth-Century Contexts on ‘Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago’ (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2021.1920348(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). Forthcoming dissemination plans include one Special Issue of Romanticism on the Net, two peer-reviewed journal articles, and the single-authored monograph based on the project’s findings.
During her fellowship, Dr. Pilz organised and convened a number of academic events and produced both academic and non-academic publications that were based on a series of academic conference and seminar presentations; she also had the pleasure of supervising MSc dissertation projects.
The results of this MSCA project have already been disseminated in form of a podcast with the artist Christina Riley for a non-academic audience (https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/In+Conversation+with+Christina+RileyA+Collecting%2C+Arranging+and+Sharing+the+Coast/1_y2wxo9rn/48781431)(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), a co-authored blog post for Rachel Carson Center’s “Seeing the Woods” series (https://seeingthewoods.org/2021/06/28/the-great-blasket-island-storytelling-and-the-environment/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) as well as an edited Special Issue for Nineteenth-Century Contexts on ‘Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago’ (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2021.1920348(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). Forthcoming dissemination plans include one Special Issue of Romanticism on the Net, two peer-reviewed journal articles, and the single-authored monograph based on the project’s findings.
The monograph resulting from COASTAL ROUTES will be the first comparative study on an archive of Irish and Scottish travel texts that will advance Romantic scholarship by putting the coast on the agenda for what has hitherto been a largely ‘land-locked’ critical field. In its analysis of Romantic imaginings of and encounters with coastal environments in our moment of climate emergency, the monograph contributes to a vital ‘blue’ corrective to ‘green’ approaches to Romantic literatures. The action has enabled Dr. Pilz to collaborate with scholars, creative practitioners as well as stakeholders in local history and natural heritage that will lead to new collaborations.