Dr. Stuart McWilliamsNewby Trust Postdoctoral Fellow |
September 2011 - May 2012 | |
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Dr. Stuart McWilliams from the School of English, Queen's University Belfast, has been awarded a 2011-12 Newby Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His research project is entitled: The Inscription of Enchantment: Magical Books in Theory and Practice How does a book become magical? This nine-month project, which will provide the foundation for my second monograph, examines the relationship between the technology of the book and the idea of enchantment. In particular, the project will address the rhetorical entanglement of narratives of secularisation and the rise of print culture, as well as the complex politics of representation which is at work – explicitly or covertly – in modern print editions of occult texts. By considering magical books as methodological "apertures" which thematise (and theorise) their own place in the history of knowledge, this project seeks to provide an aesthetic and epistemological complement to existing accounts of the grimoire from the Middle Ages to the present day, and furthermore to consider how the codex – as artefact and as interlocutor – has been at the heart of movements of enchantment and disenchantment.
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