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. (2024), ‘A vast sequence of imponderable beings’: becoming-imperceptible in the third policeman and Cees Nooteboom’s the following story. In: Ebury K., Fagan P. & Greaney J. (Eds.), Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman: environments, animals, machines. Cork: Cork University Press.
- Clemens R.A. (2024), Afterword: swamp boy summer, Soapbox 5: 289-310.
- Clemens R.A. (2022), Linguistic Incompossibility. In: Braidotti R., Klumbyte G. & Jones E. (Eds.), More Posthuman Glossary: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Adkins P., Clemens R.A. & Ryan D. (2022), Introduction: reading Braidotti / reading Woolf, Comparative Critical Studies 19(2): 115-127.
- Clemens R.A. (2022), ‘Languages are so like their boots’: linguistic incompossibility in Flush, Comparative Critical Studies 19(2): 259-280.
- Clemens R.A. (2022), Between Anxiety and Utopia: Eliot and Europe, The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual 4(1): 253-263.
- Clemens R.A. (2022), Bombast and sesquipedalian words: translation, mistranslation, and the epigraph to The Waste Land, Modernist Cultures 17(1): 109-126.
- Clemens R.A & Casey M. (2022), Viral Temporalities: Literatures of Disease and Posthuman Conceptions of Time. In: Ağın B. & Horzum Ş. (Eds.), Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media. Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities. London: Routledge.
- Clemens R.A. (2021), Review of: Braidotti R. & Hlavajova M. (2018), Poshuman glossary: Bloomsbury. Comparative Critical Studies 18(1): 99-102.
- Clemens R.A. (20 January 2020), The nomadic footnote: multilingualism and transnationalism in Modernist Paratexts (Dissertatie, Leeds Trinity, University of Leeds). Supervisor(s) and Co-supervisor(s): Taylor-Barry J., Hibbitt R.
- Clemens R.A. (2018), “Making flowers”: the first English translation of a short story by Dutch modernist Carry van Bruggen, Feminist Modernist Studies 1(3): 336-347.