Ruth Alison Clemens is a postdoctoral researcher of the NWO Startersbeurs project 'Posthuman Music Machines' at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society

More information about Ruth Clemens

Fields of interest

• Modernism and the avant-garde
• Transmedia experiments across text, film, sound, and image
• Critical approaches to language, representation, media, and technology
• Transnational, post-national, and planetary movements
• Sound studies
• The relationship between form and politics
• Critical posthumanism in relation to bodies, technology, and environment
• Design and material culture

Research

After working as a lecturer at LUCAS for two years, in August 2024 I joined LUCAS as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO Startersbeurs project 'Tracing Players Playing Traces: Non/Human Music in Modern and Contemporary Literature' led by my colleague Dr Daný van Dam. This project investigates the relationship between speculative transmedia narratives, music, and critical posthumanism, with an explicit focus on gender, race, and postcolonialism.  My research project, 'Posthuman Music Machines: Media and Culture in the Age of the Pianola,' studies images, films, and texts from the age of the player piano (1896-1929) in order to understand how avant-garde and mass cultural engagements with this new media technology shaped and were shaped by wider cultural attitudes to automatic music. 

My broad research interests cover film, cultural analysis, and comparative literary studies. My work explores the intersections between textuality and materiality, media and politics, and language and technology. As well as academic research, teaching, and writing, I enjoy undertaking practice-based work such as artistic research, critical archive studies, and creative-critical approaches. I have led artistic research workshops at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Grey Space in the Middle (The Hague), and Hypha Studios (London).

My research interests are varied, with through-lines of critical posthumanism, the avant-garde across media, film, sound, and visual arts, transnational and multilingualism, genealogies of global modernism, and the materiality of culture.

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