Shellie Hester Audsley, Murray Edwards

Biographical Information

I am working on Romantic genre-mixing and referentiality in the long nineteenth century. I examine lyric-narrative synthesis and patterns of inserted ‘conceptual fragments’ across types of hybrid prose and verse narratives to address issues of selfhood and broader critical debates about novel supremacy, lyric subsumption and genre (re)formation. Complemented by computational methods of text analysis, this research into the semiotics of genre perception seeks to understand—on a large scale—processes of associative sense-making and the unstable ideas of the generic (‘commonplace’) and otherwise.

I’m a Methods Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities 2023-24, & my workshop ‘Re-collected Thoughts: ‘Commonplacing’ Practices from Analogue to Digital’ on extracting, indexing, sustaining and networking knowledge fragments for idea generation will be held in Lent (January 22 and 29, 2024).

In the capacity as a Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA), I have developed public engagement & outreach initiatives that seek to promote Romantic scholarship and its many connections with modern readers. These include the K-SAA Digital Commonplace Book of Romantic Readers (Vol.1), which uses crowd-sourced inputs to create interactive ‘star charts’ (network graphs) for mapping global readerly networks as well as Romanticism’s lasting connections therein. Please consider submitting an entry in any future volumes, and getting involved in the related Public Outreach Program (this year’s theme is’ Commonplacing’) on k-saa.org.

Since 2022, I have been a Postgraduate Session Leader for the University’s outreach programme. I’m also a member of the 2023-4 cohort of the Entrepreneurship Lab at King’s College. Aside from research, I enjoy writing fiction and dabbling in graphic and systems design. Prior to Cambridge, I completed my MPhil at The University of Hong Kong, where I remained as a teaching assistant and thesis consultant for the Master’s programme.

Research Interests

Genre, form, mode, media networks, structure, (the) fragment(s), intertextuality, narratology, the later Romantics especially Byron, the sublime; (re)collected things—anthologies in the broadest sense of the word—& collective thought; the digital humanities.

I welcome emails & discussion in any relation to my research interests & projects, and can be contacted at sha39 [at] cam.ac.uk.