Ruth Alison Clemens is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. Her current research project is titled 'Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola' and is part of the NWO Startersbeurs project 'Tracing Players Playing Traces: Non/Human Music in Modern and Contemporary Literature' led by her colleague Dr Daný van Dam. 'Posthuman Music Machines' studies literature and culture from the age of the player piano (1896-1929) in order to understand how literary engagements with this new media technology shaped and were shaped by the wider cultural attitudes to automatic music. Dr Clemens specialises in critical approaches to multidisciplinary modern and contemporary literary studies. Her research expertise includes transnational modernism; book history and media materiality; posthuman bodies, technologies, and environments; experimental forms; and literary multilingualism and translation.

More information about Ruth Clemens

Fields of interest

• Literary and cultural modernism 
• Modernist poetry and poetics
• Critical posthumanism in relation to bodies, technology, and environment
• Paratext, design, and materiality
• Book history and publishing
• Experimental literary practice
• Intermedial literary studies, especially music and literature and technology and literature
• Translation, multilingualism, and transnationalism
• Critical and postcolonial approaches
• The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Disability studies, especially neurodiversity

Curriculum Vitae

Education 
2015–2020 PhD, University of Leeds, UK
2014–2015 MA Comparative Literature, University College London, UK
2009–2012 BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Salford, UK

Employment 
2024–present Leiden University, Postdoctoral Researcher

2022–2024 Leiden University, Lecturer in Modern Anglophone Literature, Film, and Culture 
2022–2023 University of Glasgow, Postdoctoral Research Assistant 
2019–2023 Utrecht University, Lecturer in Literary Studies 
2017–2018 Utrecht University, Visiting Research Fellow
2017–2017 University of Leeds, Visiting Lecturer in Comparative Literature 
2016–2017 Leeds Trinity University, Visiting Lecturer in English Literature

Publications

Activities