Dr Shelley Trower’s current research interests include myths of haunted locations, regionalism and nationalism. She is especially interested in the materiality of locations – as land and landscape, rocks and soil – in relation to stories of the supernatural. A monograph on this topic is in progress as part of the AHRC funded project ‘Mysticism, Myth, and ‘Celtic’ Nationalism’, led by Marion Gibson and Garry Tregidga, which will include a conference in July 2010.
Other research projects include a historical and cultural examination of vibration from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Publications include Vibratory Movements, a special issue of the journal The Senses and Society 3 (2008); ‘Nerves, Vibration, and the Aeolian Harp’, an article in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 53 (forthcoming May 2009); and ‘”Nerve-Vibration”: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s’, an essay in Neurology and Modernity, edited by Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (forthcoming, 2009). Trower has recently begun work on a monograph entitled Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound, to be published by Continuum.
As an oral historian Trower worked with the Cornish Audio Visual Archive from 2006-7 and for the Rescorla Project, an HLF funded community project from 2007-8. With Samantha Rayne a current University of Exeter PhD student Shelley is conducting a series of oral history interviews that explore perceptions of Cornwall as ‘Celtic’, and as haunted.
