The Polyphony looks back over 2019’s most popular and provocative posts.
The Greatest Hits of 2019
Sleeping it off: Sleep, Medicine, and Mental Health in Premodern England
‘What can we gain by turning to the ways in which people thought about, and performed, sleep in the past?’: Megan Leitch, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, considers contemporary understanding of sleep within its wider premodern context.
J. G. Ballard’s Spinal Landscape
‘A clinical picture of a neurological revolt against middle-class conformity’: Aidan Tynan, senior lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University, dissects J.G. Ballard’s novel and ‘anatomical portrait’, High Rise.
Attacks on the university body: on work, exhaustion, and industrial action
On the first day of the 2019 UCU strikes, Felicity Callard reflects on labour, exhaustion, and the historical currents that animate the physical and institutional bodies engaged in the present dispute.
Sticking Her Nose In: Hester Pulter’s Fleshy Gift
Dr Emily Cock discusses nose transplantation and Interregnum politics I have recently published my first monograph, all about Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture. Exciting! But, according to some people, a strange topic. Why […]