Hannah Auld
Research title: Labour, Liberty and the Market Economy in mid-19th Century American Literature
Research summary
My doctoral thesis “Labour, Liberty and the Market Economy in mid-Nineteenth Century American Literature” examines various philosophies of labour in American writing from 1831-1861, and how liberty, an idea central to American national identity, is often denied within these philosophies. By exploring labour’s presence within the antebellum literary imagination, I analyse how key writers such as Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis and Edgar Allan Poe, despite differences in genre and form, interrogate the ontology of work itself. My early research has focussed on depictions of the working body in the work of Poe and Harding Davis, highlighting the rich overlap in depictions of labour that are at once antebellum and proto-modernist. This is key, I believe, to understanding current critical debates on American selfhood and the modern ideology of work ethic.
Supervisors
Grants
Andrew Hook Centre Gordon Studentship for Taught MLitt and PhD in American Studies (2025, 2026)
Conferences
- “‘Closed Worlds’: Information and Epistemology in Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Fiction” at Saints English Graduate Conference, University of St Andrews, May 2026
- "'Something in a new key': Information, Epistemology and the Publishing Industry in Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Short Stories" at American Shorts International Conference, the Society for the Study of the American Short Story, University of Lisbon, Portugal, October 2026
Teaching
English Literature 1A: Poetry and Poetics ENGLIT1011
Additional information
Recipient of Elizabeth M. Yearling Memorial Prize for highest distinction in the Honours Shakespeare paper (2011).
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-auld-357175140
