Professor Corinna Wagner

All of my projects involve text and image.

I work in the environmental humanities, combining creative and critical practice. I am currently working on traditional and experimental photography, and on handmade photo poetry books. This work has featured in exhibitions, including 'Wicked Problems' (Uiversity of Exeter) 'Unstable Ground' (Studio KIND), 'Above and Below' (Artizan Collective Gallery), and a solo show: 'Corinna Wagner: TerraOceanus' (Thelma Hulbert Gallery). 

This work was part of a larger public-facing projects on water and climate change, coasts and culture. It was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), to work with the Tide and Time Bell Project, an art initiative that concerns coastal communities and rising sea levels and centres around bells designed by artist Marcus Vergette. See this fascinating and important work here: Home - Time and Tide Bell

I am at work on projects that combine memoir, creative non-fiction and photography, some of which can be seen on my website. I have just completed a book, Blueprints: On Looking at Ruin, which combines digital, traditional and alternative photography (including cyanotype), writing about exploring ruins and research about land use and trespass.

I am completing a book of prose poetry, which also has 'blue' in the title: some of the images and first lines from Anatomy of Blue can be seen here.

Speaking of anatomy, I am completing a book, which could also be classified as creative nontfiction, on the relationship between art and anatomy, a topic I have been publishing on and speaking about for some time. This highly illustrated book, Still Life, traces the way literature and the visual arts have represented and come to know the body's interior. Some of this work formed the basis for an appearance on Channel 4's Bone Detectives, which can be watched here. This interest was first sparked while researching my first book, Pathological Bodies.

Biography:

I took a somewhat unconventional path to academia. I had a life on the road, working as a journalist among other exciting things. After some years of travel, I decided it was time to get a degree in journalism and photography, but before I completed it, I got hooked on literature. I obtained an honours BA and a fully funded MA from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and a DPhil from the University of York, funded by the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme (ORSAS, Universities UK), a University fellowship, and SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Canada).

Before I finished my PhD, I was appointed as lecturer at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. I wrote up my thesis as I taught and was promoted to Assistant Professor. I then took a position as lecturer at Exeter, where I am now Professor in Visual and Literary Arts. I am also Director of Creative Writing. I also completed a year of an MA at Plymouth Art College in Fine Art Photography.

Research supervision:

I work with PhD candidates in both creative writing and literary studies. I supervise PhD students working in visual culture, photography, and art history, from the 18th to the 20th centuries, in medical humanities and body studies, gothic literature and Victorian medievalism, Romanticism, Victorian culture, environmentalism and blue humanities, and the natural and the built environment. Current creative writing supervisees are working on: poetry collections on environmental topics (some of which combine visual elements and writing), memoirs and creative non-fiction dealing with family trauma, a screenplay that imagines a dystopic future, informed by ideas about the chronotype.

I encourage potential PhD students to approach me, especially those interested in working across genres and disciplines, or who combine text and image, or creative and critical practice.