A Day in the Life of a PhD Researcher in the School of English
Annie Williams, 23/09
Hi there! My name is Annie Williams and I’m an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Scholar in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.
I’m working on a PhD on bodies and water in British and Irish modernism. This project explores how we can translate knowledge between literature and the medical and environmental humanities in order to better understand our bodies’ role in global aquatic ecosystems.
Specifically, I’m looking at how authors including Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf frame the evolving intersections of bodies and water in the early twentieth century, from urban plumbing to marine pollution.
It’s September, and Michaelmas term is about to start. Come with me on a day in my life! ...
My day starts at around 10am in the Trinity Long Room Hub, where I’ve just started a residency as an Early Career Researcher for 2023-4.
The Hub is an interdisciplinary research institute in the Arts and Humanities that hosts around 40 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows at a time. It’s a really welcoming space packed with researchers pursuing really interesting projects.
At my desk, I answer emails and prep for the forthcoming term of teaching, clutching a large black coffee. My first tutorial will be on Titus Andronicus, so I reread the end of the play, prepare handouts with critical quotes, and draw up a presentation schedule for the students.
When that’s done, I start a new book that I’ve had bookmarked for a while - Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago by Pippa Marland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).
At 1pm, I head to the National Library of Ireland exhibition, “Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again”, where Rosie Lavan and Nicholas Allen are hosting a conversation about reading Heaney’s work today. I’m particularly interested in discussion pertaining to Heaney’s ecological imagination, and his attentiveness to landscapes and weather patterns across Ireland.
After the reading, I return to the Hub, where I work on my thesis. During the summer, I was lucky enough to visit the US as a recipient of the University at Buffalo’s James Joyce Fellowship. Towards the end of my trip, I scurried over to the Beinecke Library at Yale to look at the Dorothy Richardson Collection.
Richardson was both a prolific novelist and a regular columnist for the prominent British medical journal, The Dental Record. Her articles, as held in the Beinecke archives, provide fascinating insights into developments in salivary diagnostics in the 1910s and 1920s, all of which directly inform the first chapter of my thesis, which is on bodily fluids in modernist novels. I type up the notes I made in the archives and slot them into my existing draft of the chapter.
At 4pm, I meet with two friends (and fellow ECRS at the Hub) from my cohort, Charlotte Buckley and Ellen Orchard, with whom I’m co-convening the School of English Staff and Postgraduate Seminar Series 2023-4. We’ve finalised our list of speakers for Michaelmas term, so we just need a short meeting to confirm paper titles before we can circulate the schedule.
Finally, at 5pm, I log into Zoom for the James Joyce Society’s roundtable, “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All”. I listen to moving and courageous testimonies from some of the most brilliant women working in the field, who lead a difficult but incredibly important conversation about how we can prevent the harassment of emerging, female, and/or gender-nonconforming scholars in Joyce Studies.
I close my laptop at around 7.30pm, and head to a friend’s flat with a bottle of wine. Obviously.
Annie Williams
Annie Williams is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Scholar in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, where she is researching her PhD on bodies and water in British and Irish modernism. She is an Early Career Researcher at the Trinity Long Room Hub 2023-4. She received the James Joyce Fellowship 2022-3 and the Leventhal Scholarship 2022. She has published criticism, poetry and prose in The Modernist Review, Critical Inquiries into Irish Studies, Berkeley Fiction Review, and Dedalus Press’ Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (2022), amongst others.
You can follow Annie on Twitter: @annieakaannie