Indigo Gray

School of English

PhD research student

igray3@sheffield.ac.uk
Jessop West

Full contact details

Indigo Gray
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Profile

Thesis title
Bodies of coal: relationships of class and species in industrial literature, 1854-1939.

Thesis abstract
My thesis explores British and French realist novels of the industrial revolution, reading descriptions of human, animal, mineral and environmental bodies in order to understand how narratives of coalmining blurred the boundaries between species, class, gender and race. I examine prominent materials in four texts: slime in Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), flesh in DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), firedamp in Lewis Jones’ Cwmardy (1939) and smog in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854). Using a materialist ecocritical approach, I examine the impact of the transition from agriculture to industry on novels about working-class people and the landscapes in which they live and work.

Qualifications

MA in English Literature, University of Sheffield, 2021
BA (Hons) in English Literature, University of East Anglia, 2019

Research group

Supervisors

Grants

PhD scholarship: AHRC White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities

Teaching activities

EGH111 Foundations in Literary Study – Biblical and Classical Sources in English Literature

Professional activities and memberships
  • Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) reading group convener and web content manager.
  • Member of ASLE-UKI.
  • Freelance researcher for Sheffield Museums on the project ‘Decolonising Sheffield Museums: Metalwork and Industry Collections.’
  • Assistant researcher for Sheffield Museums, conducting research on the international reach of Stephenson Blake, typefounders in Sheffield, 1818-1996.
  • Copyeditor for field: journal.
  • Open Access Monograph Champion for the Arts and Humanities.

Conferences

  • ‘Decolonising the metal collection at Kelham Island Museum’ at Decolonising Museum Collections, Sheffield, July 2024 – Conference organiser
  • ‘Vibrant animal colonial matter at Kelham Island Museum’ at ShARC Tales 4, University of Sheffield, May 2024
  • ‘Reclaiming the coalmine in Sons and Lovers’ at ASLE USA, Portland, Oregon, July 2023
  • ‘The body and the mine according to Mr Morel’ at ShARC Tales 3, University of Sheffield, May 2023 – Conference organiser
  • ‘Posture and slime in Émile Zola’s Germinal’ at Early Encounters with Coal, University of Cambridge, December 2022
  • ‘Posture, evolution, and the politics of slime in Émile Zola’s Germinal’ at BSLS, September 2022
  • ‘Slime and Protoplasm: Evolution and descent in the animalia of Germinal’ at ASLE-UKI, Northumbria University, August 2022
  • ‘More than canaries in the coalmine’ at ShARC Tales 2, University of Sheffield, May 2022 – Conference organiser