Ruth Clemens
Postdoctoral researcher
- Name
- Dr. R.A. Clemens
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2165
- r.a.clemens@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0003-3937-4627

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
Postdoctoral researcher
- Faculty of Humanities
- Centre for the Arts in Society
- Moderne Engelstalige letterkunde
- Clemens R.A. & Talviste E. 4 October 2024 - 5 October 2024. Borders, Margins, Cartographies: Transnational Modernist Women’s Writing. University of Tartu. Tartu. [contribution to an event].
- Clemens R.A. 17 September 2024 - 19 September 2024. The Avant-Garde and War: 9th Annual Conference of the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM). Jagiellonian University Cracow. Kraków (Poland). [conference attendance].
- Clemens R.A. 27 June 2024 - 29 June 2024. Ephemeral Modernisms: The Conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS). University of Leeds. Leeds. [conference attendance].
- Clemens R.A. 3 July 2024 - 10 July 2024. intelligence instituting archiving: 16th Annual Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp. TU Delft. Delft. [conference attendance].
- Clemens R.A. 3 July 2024 - 10 July 2024. intelligence instituting archiving: 16th Annual Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp. TU Delft. Delft. [conference attendance].
- Clemens R.A., Khan S.N. & Crouch J.A. (29 February 2024). Always fluid but never fluent: relational methods for communication systems beyond the human. Hypha Studios. London. [performance].
- 2022 - 2027 Advisory Board member, Frame Journal of Literary Studies. [ancillary activities].
- Clemens R.A., Morvan A. & Hayes B. (19 July 2024), Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI. Interviewed by Battersby M. for The Bookseller. [interview].
- Clemens R.A. 2023 - 2024. Summer School: The Intersectional Posthumanities. Utrecht Summer School. Utrecht University. [teaching].
- Clemens R.A.. FRAME Journal of Literary Studies - Advisory Board Member. [professional membership].
- Clemens R.A. 26 October 2023 - 29 October 2023. Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Annual Meeting. MSA. Brooklyn, New York City. [conference attendance].
- Clemens R.A. 12 September 2023 - 12 September 2023. LASER Talks in Vienna: SIGNOIDS - Part 1: Transversal Subjectivities’. University of Applied Arts and Medical University Vienna. [conference attendance].
- Adkins P., Clemens R.A. & Ryan D. (2022), Guest editor: Reading Braidotti / Reading Woolf. Comparative Critical Studies 19(2).
- Clemens R.A. & Taylor-Batty J. (2022), Guest editor: T. S. Eliot and Europe. The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual 4.
- 2022 - 2027 Associate Editor: Future Humanities, Wiley. [ancillary activities].
- 2022 - 2022. Summer School: The Posthuman Life of Methods. Utrecht Summer School. Utrecht University. [teaching].
- . University of London. [contribution to an event].
- 2021 - 2021. Summer School: The Posthuman and New Materialism. Utrecht Summer School. Utrecht University. [teaching].
- Clemens R.A., Roberts K. & Sutherland C.. University of Groningen. [contribution to an event].
- 2020 - 2020. Summer School: Posthuman Convergences. Utrecht Summer School. Utrecht University. [teaching].
- 2019 - 2019. Summer School: Posthuman Knowledge(s). Utrecht Summer School. Utrecht University. [teaching].
- . Advance HE (Higher Education Academy) - Associate Fellow (AFHEA). [professional membership].
- (2018), The Modernist Review. [website].
- . Reviewer for Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism.