Introduction

Abstract

Picture a researcher in an international academic forum – perhaps an interdisciplinary research committee or assessment panel – who is asked, over coffee or during the opening tour de table, to describe her research field. If, like me, she is from the UK, she would give little real information by saying ‘I’m in a School of Modern Languages’ or ‘an English department’. It might make more sense to describe the field in which she got her undergraduate and research degrees as ‘literary studies’. But if the next question is ‘ … and what are you working on now?’, the answer might be anything from ‘trauma museums’ to ‘TV vampires’, or even from ‘buried bones’ to ‘the psychology of skin’. What this demonstrates is that one can be a literary scholar and yet be working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. Something has happened to both the researchers and the discipline that has changed the shape of this field of the humanities. And it has arguably happened without even those engaged on it being fully aware of how they have changed.