Professor Jason Hall
Professor
Overview
Professor Jason Hall is a literary and cultural historian whose research and teaching range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published several books and articles on poetics, fiction, material culture, the history of science and technology. At Exeter Professor Hall teaches modules on critical theory, academic writing, poetry, sensation fiction and adventure romance. Occasionally he contributes to Exeter's Liberal Arts programme. He is currently Deputy Director of Education for the Department of English and Creative Writing
Research
- Victorian Literature and Culture
- Poetry, Poetics and Historical Prosody
- History of Science, Technology and Medicine
- Seamus Heaney
- Modern Irish Poetry
Professor Hall's research focuses on the literary and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on poetry, ‘historical prosody’ and the history of science and technology.
Professor Hall's first monograph, Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract, was published in 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan, and he co-edited the 2007 collection Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator with the late Ashby Bland Crowder. Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, a compilation of new essays, was published in 2011 by Ohio University Press. He also organised the related conference 'Meter Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780-1914' with Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies in 2008. Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siecle, co-edited with Alex Murray, appeared in 2013 with Palgrave Macmillan as part of Joseph Bristow's Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series. Professor Hall's edition of Jezebel's Daughter, an 1880 novel by Wilkie Collins, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 as part of the Oxford World's Classics series. Research for this edition was supported by a one-month fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent book, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (2017), was published by Palgrave Macmillan, also in Bristow's series.
Professor Hall has a longstanding interest science. For more than a decade, he has been pursuing questions of rhythm, elocution and voice, particularly as they intersect with the sciences and technologies of the long nineteenth century. In 2014 he was the recipient of an AHRC Science in Culture Innovation Award to support restoration work on the Eureka Latin Hexameter Machine, a one-of-a-kind poetry 'computer' from the 1840s. His current work, which builds on his interests in science, examines the visual culture of astronomy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With colleagues in Astrophysics and Exeter's Digital Humanities Lab, Professor Hall is examining the extensive archive of glass plates held by the Norman Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth. Always keen to understand how humanistic and scientific cultures interact, he is following up the astronomical interests of nineteenth-century and Modernist authors, such as Poe, Verne, Tennyson, Rossetti and Joyce.
Professor Hall's articles have appeared in the journals Configurations, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Poetry, James Joyce Quarterly and Literature Compass, and he serves as a reader for a number of peer-reviewed journals and well-known publishing houses.
Supervision
Professor Hall welcomes enquiries from research students with interests in Victorian and twentieth-century literature, esp. poetry and sensation fiction; prosody and versification; history of science and technology.
Research students
Current and completed students:
Victoria Nel, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Law
Beatrice Steele, Nineteenth-Century Astronomy and the Norman Lockyer Archives (SWW DTP CDA)
Shareefa Al-Motaani, The Depiction of Women in the Sensation Novel
Beth Howell, Literature and the Isles of Scilly (Eden Phillpotts Memorial Scholarship)
Christopher Parsons, The Work of James Dryden Hosken
Trevor Hamilton, Society for Psychical Research
Ryan Sweet, Victorian Prosthesis (AHRC)
Rebecca Mills, Space, Place and Twentieth-Century Elegy (ESF)
Elizabeth Micakovic, T. S. Eliot's Voices (AHRC)
Ulrike Hill, Poetry of Mathilde Blind
Christina Lake, Evolution, Eugenics and Victorian Utopian Fiction
Niamh Downing, Unearthing Spatial Tropes in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (ESF)
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
| 2023 | 2020 | 2017 | 2013 | 2011 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2005 | 2004 | 2002 |
2023
- Hall J. (2023) Stephen’s Telescopic Imagination: Geography, Astronomy, and Spatial Analytics in A Portrait, James Joyce quarterly.
2020
- Hall JD. (2020) 'Looking Downward Thence’: D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in Astronomical Focus, Victorian Poetry, volume 57, pages 321-343, DOI:10.1353/vp.2019.0015.
- Hall JD. (2020) Mathematics and Poetic Meter, Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics, Palgrave Macmillan, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-55478-1_11.
- Hall JD. (2020) Sonic Forms: Ezra Pound's Anti-Metronome Modernism in Context, Sound and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 74-91, DOI:10.1017/9781108855532.004.
2017
- Hall JD. (2017) Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter, Palgrave Macmillan, DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-53502-9.
2013
- Murray A, Hall JD. (2013) Introduction: Decadent Poetics, DECADENT POETICS: LITERATURE AND FORM AT THE BRITISH FIN DE SIECLE, pages 1-25. [PDF]
- Hall JD, Murray AW. (2013) Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siecle, Palgrave Macmillan. [PDF]
2011
- Hall JD. (2011) Materializing Meter: Physiology, Psychology, Prosody, Victorian Poetry, volume 49, no. 2, pages 179-197.
2009
- Hall JD. (2009) Metre, History, Context: Introduciton to the Metre Matters Cluster, Literature Compass, volume 6, no. 2, pages 511-514.
- Hall JD. (2009) A Lead on a Dog?, James Joyce Quarterly, volume 46, no. 3-4, pages 361-363.
- Hall JD. (2009) Mechanized Metrics: From Verse Science to Laboratory Prosody, 1880-1918, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, volume 17, no. 3, pages 285-308, DOI:10.1353/con.2009.0000. [PDF]
- Hall JD. (2009) Seamus Heaney's Rhythmic Contract, Palgrave Macmillan. [PDF]
2008
- Hall JD. (2008) Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780-1914, Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780-1914, Centre For Victorian Studies, University Of Exeter, 3rd - 5th Jul 2008.
2007
- Hall JD, Crowder AB. (2007) Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator, Palgrave Macmillan. [PDF]
- Hall JD. (2007) Popular Prosody: Spectacle and the Politics of Victorian Versification, Nineteenth-Century Literature, volume 62, no. 2, pages 222-249, DOI:10.1525/ncl.2007.62.2.222.
2005
- Hall JD. (2005) Form and Process: Seamus Heaney's 'A New Life' into 'Act of Union', Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future, University of Sunderland Press, 153-163.
2004
- Hall JD. (2004) Rhyme in Seamus Heaney’s Group Poems, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, volume 17, no. 3, pages 55-60.
2002
- Hall JD. (2002) Heaney's 'Requiem for the Croppies', Explicator, volume 61, pages 56-59.
Teaching
Modules taught
- EAS1038 - The Poem
- EAS1040 - Academic English
- EAS3417 - Sex, Scandal and Sensation in Victorian Literature
- LIB1105 - Being Human in the Modern World
Biography
Professor Hall has worked at Exeter since 2004. From 2014 until 2016, he served as inaugural head of the Department of Penryn Humanities, comprising the disciplines of History and English. He served as Associate Director of Exeter's International Institute for Cultural Enquiry (now the Societies and Cultures Institute). Currently, he is Deputy Director of Education for the Department of English and Creative Writing and also one of the Department's eight Academic Leads, providing mentoring and career progression guidance for colleagues.
Before coming to Exeter, Professor Hall taught in higher-education institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States. He holds a BA in English from Hendrix College, a small liberal arts college in his home state of Arkansas (pronounced AR-kan-saw), and a PhD in English from the University of London (Birkbeck College).