Staff profile

About Me

Office hours: Friday 10-11am (via Zoom) and by appointment.

My research interests lie primarily in the modernist period, with particular expertise in literature's rendering of tactile experience and wider cultures of touch in the early twentieth century, and in modernist writing's engagement with mountain landscapes and the figure of the mountaineer up to and including the Second World War. Broadly, I investigate language's capacities and limitations when addressing the adventures of the human body.

I completed my studies at the University of Edinburgh, with a short break pre-PhD, working full time as a journalist. I was granted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh), and held a permanent lectureship in modernist literature at Newcastle University (including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship) before joining Durham in early 2015.

Administrative Roles

Director of Research, Department of English Studies

Associate Director, DurhamARCTIC (funded Leverhulme Trust)

Department Research Commitee (Chair)

Department Management Committee (Member)

EDI Committee (Member)

Athena Swan Committee (Member)

Department Progression and Promotion Committee (Member)

Current Research

My current research is split into two areas of investigation in the modernist period: various forms of mountain writing, and somatic, sensory, and gestural experience in literary contexts. High Modernism: A Literary History of Mountaineering, 1890-1945 was granted a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2013-2014, facilitating archival research around the UK. I then developed the book as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. A related podcast, 'Mountains' (recorded as part of the BBC Proms 2018), is available here. I chose not to publish my PhD thesis (on geometrical space in modernist art and literature). My first monograph, written as a postdoctoral fellow, was Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (EUP 2013; 2015). I extend this area of work in a monograph provisionally entitled The Modernist Fidget: Gesture, Attention, and Agency in the Early Twentieth Century.

Doctoral Supervision & Postdoctoral Mentorship

I would be pleased to hear from potential PhD students proposing to work in the modernist period (c.1890-1945), or on modernist-influenced mid-century and contemporary writing. Projects tackling the body, the senses, or mountain-related writing are particularly welcome. I mentor colleagues holding Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships, most recently Dr Noreen Masud.

Current PhD students: 

Ms Francesca Adams, "Cultivating Fiction: Agricultural Life and the Form of the Novel in Thomas Hardy and George Eliot" (Co-supervisor: Dr Peter Garratt)

Ms Bryony Armstrong, "The Kiss in Modernist Literature" (Second supervisors: Dr Marco Bernini; Prof. John Nash) (Funded AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium) (Durham University Student Achievement Award 2020)

Mr Gao Dazheng, "Of Transparent Things Impenetrable: Quotidian Objects and Narrative Phenomenology in Modernist Fiction" (Co-supervisors: Prof. James Smith; Prof. John Nash) (Funded China Scholarships Council)

Mr Christian Drury, "'Semi-Professional Polar Explorers': Empire, Modernity, and Temporality in British Arctic Travel Narratives, 1875-1940" (Co-supervisor: Dr James Koranyi (History)) (Funded DurhamARCTIC)

Mr Ryan McNab, "Selfhood, Rurality, and the Sensorial Body in the Age of British Modernism, 1910-1945" (Second supervisor: Prof. John Nash) (Funded AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium)

Esteem Indicators

Member of Advisory Council, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Spring 2017-present. Details: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/about-us

External Examiner, Undergraduate English Literature programme, University of Edinburgh, 2016-2021

Partnerships and Engagement Travel Fund, Durham University, "Mountain Heritage Trust/Keswick Museum," 2019

University Impact Development Funding, Durham University, "The Lost Tent: The Bentley Beetham Collections," 2019

University Research Impact Funding, Durham University, "Scaling the Heights," 2017-2018

Faculty Research Funding, Durham University, "Scaling the Heights," Spring 2017

Faculty Research Funding, Durham University, "Reading Habits of the Modernist Mountaineer: The Fell and Rock Climbing Club Library at the Armitt Museum, Ambleside," July 2015

AHRC Care for the Future (ECR) Developmental Award, “The Hero Project,” 2015-2016 (Principal Investigator)

Visiting Research Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, with special attachment to the Mountaineering & Polar Collections, National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), 2014-2015

Leverhulme Research Fellowship, High Modernism: A Literary History of Mountaineering, 1890-1945, 2013-2014

Faculty Research Fund Award, Newcastle University, “Modernist Mountaineers: UK Archival Holdings,” 2012-2013

Prize for Mountain Writing, Mountaineering Council of Scotland/Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival, 2011 (2nd prize)

Postdoctoral Fellowship, “Touching Texts,” Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh

AHRC Doctoral Award, University of Edinburgh

Impact & Public Engagement

I led an Impact Case Study for REF2021, including elements of the following activities:

"Scaling the Heights": A collaboration with the artist Stephen Livingstone, this exhibition opened at the Oriental Museum (Durham) in 2018, then toured to Keswick Museum until February 2020. Supported Arts Council England, Durham University Research Impact Fund, Impact Development Fund, A&H Faculty Research Fund. Find us on Instagram.

“The Hero Project”: With colleagues at Birmingham and Aberdeen universities, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), I was awarded AHRC funding via the Care for the Future Developmental Award route. We considered, through a variety of activities, the historical contingency of the identification of hero figures, and the role of the hero in forming national and/or community identity. Our online exhibition "No Heroes Any More?" used the collections of the NGS, was co-curated with young people aged 16-18, and is available here. I was the project's Principal Investigator.

"Savage Arena: The Legacy of Joe Tasker": I co-curated, with the Mountain Heritage Trust and Ushaw College (Durham), an exhibition regarding the mountaineering and mountain writing achievements of Tasker. It appeared at Ushaw College, Keswick Museum, and (in an expanded version) at Preston Park Museum. The project was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Memberships

Modernist Studies Association; British Association for Modernist Studies; British Mountaineering Council. In 2014 I was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2022 I joined the AHRC Research Network 'Other Everests.'

Public Writing & Broadcasts

• "Every Little Touch," BBC Radio 4, 11 October 2020. Contributor. Invited.
• "Proms Plus: Mountains"' BBC Radio 3, 30 July 2018. Co-speaker. Invited.
• Garrington, Abbie (2018). "Scaling the Heights." Exhibition catalogue essay.
• Garrington, Abbie (2016). "Savage Arena: The Legacy of Joe Tasker." Exhibition catalogue essay.
• Garrington, Abbie (2014). "The Beauty of Effort: The Mountain Art of Susan Dobson." Exhibition catalogue essay.

Recent & Forthcoming Presentations

"Thinking Like a Mountain," seminar with Helen Mort and Dr Kerri Andrews, Manchester Metropolitan University Centre for Place Writing, 1 June 2023. Invited.

"Meeting Mountains," co-presentation with Dr Carla Benzan, Mountains in the Humanities Conference (Leverhulme), University of St Andrews, 8-10 December 2022. Invited.

"Mountains and the Modernist Pictorial Press," Mountains and Literature Conference for International Mountain Day, Universita della Valle d'Aosta, 13 December 2021. Keynote address. Invited.

"Feeling Fidgety: New Gestural Perspectives on Modernist Writing," Fragments of Touch Conference, University of Montreal, 26 March 2021. Keynote address. Invited. [Online presentation.]

“Hardy’s Hedges,” London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 3 December 2020. Invited. [Online presentation.]

"Charlie Chaplin and the Fidgeting Film," Peterhouse Theory Group, University of Cambridge, 3 March 2020. Invited.

"Touch and the New Nature Writing," Space, Place and Sensory Perception seminar, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, 3 February 2020. Invited.

"What Is It to Fidget?," BBC/Wellcome Trust Workshop, London, 5 September 2019. Invited.

"Clock Time, Clerk Time, Mountain Time: Modernist Workers Access the Alps," Modernist Studies in Asia Network Annual Conference, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, 12-14 September 2019.

"Modern Times, Modern Fidgets," The Long 1930s Roundtable, University of Hamburg, 9 July 2019. Invited.

"Black, White, and Read All Over: Mines and Mountains in the Modernist Press," Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, 1 May 2019. Invited.

"Aerial Graham," (co-written with Prof. David Trotter), Centenary Seminar for W. S. Graham, University of Cambridge, 11 January 2019. Invited.

"A Parliament of Fidgets: Objects, Fiddling, and the Steady Hand of Modernist Governance," Modernist Objects Conference, Paris-Sorbonne, 13-16 June 2018.

"Hawk, Airman, Mountaineer: Auden and Circle and the Aerial View," Literary and Visual Landscapes Seminar Series, University of Bristol, 7 May 2018. Invited.

"Performing Mountain Archives," Performing Mountains Conference, University of Leeds, 22-24 March 2018.

Teaching

ENGL43530 "Modernism and Touch" - MA Optional Module - Seminar Leader [Not available 2022-23]

ENGL4XXX "Writing the Body in the Long Twentieth Century" - MA Optional Module - Seminar Co-Leader [Launching 2023-24]

ENGL43330 "Reading as a Writer" - MA Optional Module - Lecturer

ENGL3241 "Writing Mountains in the Early Twentieth Century" - UG Special Topic Module - Seminar Leader

ENGL3XXX "Life Write Now: Reading Contemporary Autofiction" - UG Special Topic Module - Seminar Leader [Launching 2024-25]

ENGL2081 "Literature of the Modern Period" - UG Module - Lecturer; Tutor

ENGL2071 "Victorian Literature" - Lecturer

ENGL1071 "Introduction to Poetry" - Lecturer

UG Dissertation; MA Dissertation - Supervisor

• The body and the senses
• Late Victorian, modernist, mid-century, and contemporary writing
• Touch/the haptic; gesture; histories of the human hand
• Attention; distraction; habit; rhythm; repetition
• Mountain writing
• Sensing the natural world

Authored book

• Garrington, Abbie (Planned). The Modernist Fidget: Gesture, Attention, and Agency in the Early Twentieth Century.
• Garrington, Abbie (Planned). High Modernism: A Literary History of Mountaineering, 1890-1945.
• Garrington, Abbie (2013). Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh University Press.

Book review

• Garrington, Abbie (2023). Review of The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao. Modern Language Review
• Garrington, Abbie (2022). Review of Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology by Allyson DeMaagd. Studies in the Novel 54(4): 447-450.
• Garrington, Abbie (2022). Close/Reading: Modernist Intimacies ed. Elsa Hogberg. Women: A Cultural Review 33(1): 142-145.
• Garrington, Abbie (2013). Pragmatic Modernism by Lisi Schoenbach. Modern Language Review 108(4): 1264-1265.
• Garrington, Abbie (2012). Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime by Ann C. Colley. Studies in Travel Writing 16(1): 81-82.

Chapter in book

• Garrington, Abbie (2023). 'Steering here at my keeling trade': W. S. Graham and the Poetry of the Keel. In Reading W. S. Graham. Allen, Edward Edinburgh University Press.
• Garrington, Abbie (2023). Histories of the Human Hand: Huxley and Isherwood’s Jacob’s Hands and Modernist Manual Culture. In Literature and the Senses. Kern-Staehler, Annette & Robertson, Elizabeth Oxford University Press.
• Garrington, Abbie (2021). Black, White, and Read All Over: Mines, Mountains, and the Paysage Moralisé of the British Press. In British Literature in Transition, vol. I: 1900-1920. Purdon, James Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1: 158-176.
• Garrington, Abbie (2021). Mysterious Gear: Modernist Mountaineering, Oxygen Rigs, and the Politics of Breath. In The Life of Breath, Classical to Contemporary: Literature, Culture, and Medicine. Saunders, Corinne, Fuller, David & Macnaughton, Jane Palgrave Macmillan.
• Garrington, Abbie (2016). Early Auden. In Oxford Handbooks Online: Scholarly Research Reviews. Oxford University Press.
• Garrington, Abbie (2015). The Line that Binds: Climbing Narratives, Ropework and Epistolary Practice. In Modernism and Affect. Taylor, Julie Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 75-93.

Journal Article

• Garrington, Abbie (2022). The Rock in Rock and Roll: A Short History. Alpine Journal 126: 61-75.
• Garrington, Abbie (2016). 'Write me a little letter': The George Mallory/Marjorie Holmes Correspondence. Alpine Journal 120: 123-133.
• Garrington, Abbie (2013). What Does a Modernist Mountain Mean? Auden and Isherwood's The Ascent of F6. Critical Quarterly 55(2): 26-49.
• Garrington, Abbie (2010). Touching Texts: The Haptic Sense in Modernist Literature. Literature Compass 7(9): 810-823.
• Garrington, Abbie (2008). Touching Dorothy Richardson: Approaching Pilgrimage as a Haptic Text. Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 1(1): 74-96.
• Garrington, Abbie (2008). Counter Discourse: Advertising Technologies and Textual Impact. The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 4(1): 83-100.
• Garrington, Abbie (2008). Reflections on a Cinematic Story. Journal of the Short Story in English 50: 217-225.