Dr Arthur Rose

I am interested in how literary cultural studies helps us to understand environmental and health crises in the world we live in. This has led me in different directions, from coal mining in the Naturalist novel to the role played by closure in imagining how epidemics end, but all with the aim of figuring out what literature teaches us about ourselves, our health and our environments. From 2015 on, I have focused on how concerns about breath communicate political engagements with health and the environment: how, for instance, breathing works so well as a rhetorical figure in political movements, or how worries about asbestos, already implicated in the conspiracies of the companies that mined and manufactured it, becomes container for other forms of “fake news.” At the same time, I have maintained an interest, begun during my PhD at the University of Leeds, in negative affects, emotions and dispositions. Some of this work formed the basis of my first monograph, Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee, which addressed cynicism as a disposition accommodated by established authors as they enter the late style phase of their careers. More recently, I have drawn together this work with my interest in environmental/health crises by considering the role played by shame in health contexts, as a matter for public health and as an issue in medical culture. As part of ongoing research in this area, I am employed on the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award Shame and Medicine, led by Luna Dolezal (Exeter) and Matthew Gibson (Birmingham).

My initial training was in 20th Century Postcolonial and World Literature, with a focus on Postcolonial Late Modernism, and I maintain an interest in that area, but, as the above paragraph suggests, I have expanded this to look at the ways that literature tracks environmental harms and their effects on health. A special area of study has been asbestos, which became the focus of my second monograph Asbestos--The Last Modernist Object (shortlisted for the 2023 MSA Book Prize), and I continue to write and work on this topic and other environmental hazards, as a literary scholar and in interdisciplinary collaborations with activists, scholars and professionals in law, healthcare and asbestos management.

I would be delighted to talk to anyone interested in my areas of study -- the health humanities, literature and the environment, postwar and world literature, comparative literature, and negative affects and dispositions (especially shame and cynicism).

A list of my publications can be found here.