Tephrochronology

Tephrochronology is the use of primary, characterized tephras or cryptotephras as chronostratigraphic marker beds to connect and synchronize geological, paleoenvironmental, or archaeological sequences or events, or soils/paleosols, and, uniquely, to transfer relative or numerical ages or dates to them using stratigraphic and age information together with mineralogical and geochemical compositional data, especially from individual glass-shard analyses, obtained for the tephra/cryptotephra deposits. To function as an age-equivalent correlation and chronostratigraphic dating tool, tephrochronology may be undertaken in three steps: (i) mapping and describing tephras and determining their stratigraphic relationships, (ii) characterizing tephras or cryptotephras in the laboratory, and (iii) dating them using a wide range of geochronological methods. Tephrochronology is also an important tool in volcanology, informing studies on volcanic petrology, volcano eruption histories and hazards, and volcano-climate forcing. Although limitations and challenges remain, multidisciplinary applications of tephrochronology continue to grow markedly

Literary studies and the academy

In 1885 the University of Oxford invited applications for the newly created Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. The holder of the chair was, according to the statutes, to ‘lecture and give instruction on the broad history and criticism of English Language and Literature, and on the works of approved English authors’. This was not in itself a particularly innovatory move, as the study of English vernacular literature had played some part in higher education in Britain for over a century. Oxford University had put English as a subject into its pass degree in 1873, had been participating since 1878 in extension teaching, of which literary study formed a significant part, and had since 1881 been setting special examinations in the subject for its non-graduating women students. What was new was the fact that this ancient university appeared to be on the verge of granting the solid academic legitimacy of an established chair to an institutionally marginal and often contentious intellectual pursuit, acknowledging the study of literary texts in English to be a fit subject not just for women and the educationally disadvantaged but also for university men

Pulling oneself together: power and character in British literature, 1914-1939

A revealing legend from the First World War told of a tribe of deserters from all armies that had reverted to a pre-political ???state of nature,??? living beneath no-man???s-land in abandoned trenches and pillaging corpses in the night. This tale inspires the under-examined question that is central to my dissertation: how did the First World War alter English citizens??? relation to political power at its most basic level? Literary scholars have read interwar literature as an attempt to work through war trauma, and they have focused on the transformative cultural changes the war brought about. The field has not, however, given sustained attention to the threat that the war posed to established models of governmental and political legitimation, even though Westminster acknowledged the threat in unprecedented legislative interventions. Through readings of familiar and unfamiliar interwar literature, my dissertation analyzes how Britons constituted themselves as objects of state power during a culturally and psychologically fragmenting state of emergency. Drawing on such archival material as letters, diaries, parliamentary debates, medical treatises, and self-help books, my dissertation shows how state power administered British bodies and minds through the inter-related sites of law, medicine, and labor. My first chapter, ???Character, Power, and Britain???s Emergency Measures,??? argues that the political philosophy concepts of the sovereign decision, biopower, and governmentality can help us better understand the cultural and literary production of the interwar years. During the 1914-18 war, the British government took exceptional and extralegal measures that citizens generally supported or took for granted. In retrospect, interwar writers engaged sometimes paradoxical questions of citizens??? roles, rights, and obligations in a liberal state engaged in total war. This chapter demonstrates that writers and observers often worked through the fundamental political problem of the sources and limits of state power presented by the war, and the way the war changed the interface between the citizen and the state, by referring to changes in both personal and national ???character,??? which constituted a complex and often contradictory nexus of social and political codes. Chapter 2, ???Corporeal Law: Community, Memory, and the Missing Subject??? focuses on the The Defence of the Realm Act (1914) and related legislation. These laws disrupted forms of communal, cultural and political identification across geographic and economic lines. In Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon???s Sunset Song (1932) and T.S. Eliot???s The Waste Land (1922), communal disruptions produce self-alienated subjects who struggle to stabilize a sense of self among contradictory cultural and political demands. Gibbon???s novel is an imaginative recreation of how wartime legislation compelled isolated rural communities to form permanent new relationships to the state through the violent appropriation of natural resources and rural labor. The Waste Land similarly presents the intervention of the war???s material conditions into the biological existences of English subjects, but also questions the legitimacy of any sovereign decision in so fragmented a society. Chapter 3, ???Getting the Right Idea: Shell Shock, Contagion, and Control,??? examines aesthetic and cultural reactions to the psychological treatment of soldiers, focusing particularly on the gender crisis ???shell shock??? revealed. The chapter is underwritten by an analysis of interwar self-help books by recovering shell shock sufferers???a previously unexamined archive that I discovered in the British Library and Imperial War Museum. These texts demonstrate that acceptable forms of recovery often depended on the sufferer???s willingness to resituate himself within social hierarchies and gender norms by appropriating the power and assuming the role of the medical expert. The unique social and psychological structure of shell shock treatment underlies Rebecca West???s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf???s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). West???s Chris Baldry and Woolf???s Septimus Smith both confront the threat of confinement and the loss of personal agency as a result of their trauma. Stripped of their identities through highly personalized psychological interventions, Chris and Septimus must choose between reinscription and complicity within rigid gender and power structures, or the permanent obliteration of their prewar identities. Chapter 4, ???Unmaking and Remaking: The Values of War Labor,??? focuses on how the war altered English subjects??? relations to work. I argue that Hannah Arendt???s theories of labor, work, and action clarify the values attached to forms of war work, and how war work tied subjectivity to identification with or against state power. Vera Brittain chronicled her changing attitudes toward work before, during, and after the war in her memoir Testament of Youth (1933), which, I argue, cannot be understood without attending to her complex and intertwined work as a student at Oxford, her labor as a war nurse, and her action as an internationalist peace advocate. As the war poet most closely allied with high modernist style, David Jones resolves shell shock in his long poem In Parenthesis (1937) by translating his years of labor as a soldier into a highly formalized work of art, thereby transforming himself from animal laborans to homo faber. In a brief postscript, I suggest the historical and political continuity between the interwar and postwar periods, suggesting that the methodology of this approach could be usefully applied to the analysis of postcolonial, as well as British literature

Trans-Atlantic Shell Shock: British and American Literatures of World War One Trauma

During the summer of 2016, I used my Presidential Summer Award to conduct research at the National World War I Museum and draft a book proposal for the University of North Georgia Press. The proposed collection of essays, now under contract, addresses the need for a comparative analysis of the British and American cultural and literary receptions of shell shock and other World War I trauma. While the effect of shell shock on British modernism has been the subject of much analysis, there has not yet been an interdisciplinary study of the correlative effects on American modernism and interwar culture. This is a timely project as we observe the centenary of the war, and is particularly well suited to UNG because it facilitates discussion in the university and the larger community of the nature of war trauma, a subject of great interest to our many veteran students and to our Corps of Cadets. My introduction to the book establishes a context for the analysis of shell shock literature by comparing military, medical, and social reactions to World War I trauma in the UK and the USA. In the UK, I argue, shell shock was a national crisis that radically undermined British cultural assumptions about masculinity and character. Shell shock baffled British medical and military experts, who treated the condition variously as a problem of physical health, legality, and psychology. The length and severity of the crisis generated an entire literature of shell shock that was not limited to the famous “trench poets,” such as Sassoon and Owen, but included women who served in various capacities as well as civilians of both sexes. American literature of shell shock is less extensive because Americans were involved relatively briefly in the war. However, my research shows that, while shell shock took the UK by surprise, the American medical and military establishments had studied it extensively and put great effort into obviating the problem. Indeed, the material realization of the mobilization of the American military was heavily influenced by the study of shell shock. Initially, shell shock was anticipated as an inevitable and immediate concern of modern warfare. However, it was not generally realized in American veterans until after the war was over. American shell shock, as the US Army later realized, was widespread, but emerged gradually in veterans. It also emerged gradually in American literature throughout the interwar years and beyond

Cryptotephras: the revolution in correlation and precision dating

From its Icelandic origins in the study of visible tephra horizons, tephrochronology took a remarkable step in the late 1980 s with the discovery of a ca. 4300-year-old microscopic ash layer in a Scottish peat bog. Since then, the search for these cryptotephra deposits in distal areas has gone from strength to strength. Indeed, a recent discovery demonstrates how a few fine-grained glass shards from an Alaskan eruption have been dispersed more than 7000 km to northern Europe. Instantaneous deposition of geochemically distinct volcanic ash over such large geographical areas gives rise to a powerful correlation tool with considerable potential for addressing a range of scientific questions. A prerequisite of this work is the establishment of regional tephrochronological frameworks that include well-constrained age estimates and robust geochemical signatures for each deposit. With distal sites revealing a complex record of previously unknown volcanic events, frameworks are regularly revised, and it has become apparent that some closely timed eruptions have similar geochemical signatures. The search for unique and robust geochemical fingerprints thus hinges on rigorous analysis by electron microprobe and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. Historical developments and significant breakthroughs are presented to chart the revolution in correlation and precision dating over the last 50 years using tephrochronology and cryptotephrochronology