Congratulations to William Smith and Olivia Sutherland on passing their DPhil vivas
The RAI congratulates two of its Postgraduate Members, Bill Smith and Olivia Sutherland, on passing their doctoral vivas.
Bill Smith has recently graduated after completing his DPhil dissertation, '“Chasing Freedom and Hunting Power:
A Multispecies History of Emancipation and Control in the American Civil War Era”.
Bill’s thesis argued that plantation slavery, the American Civil War, and the Era of Reconstruction were inseparable from animals and the natural world. This multispecies history read historical evidence alongside research from the life sciences to understand how animal behaviours and environmental processes made slavery enforceable, escape possible, military campaigns viable, and postwar freedom vulnerable. Bill's examiners were Professor Adam Smith from the RAI and Professor David Silkenat from the University of Florida. Passing with just minor corrections, Bill's examiners described his work as an 'imaginative, deeply researched dissertation...of the policing of slavery on plantations, and of self-emancipation before and during the Civil War. The dissertation's intellectual contribution is to de-centre humans in the study of slavery and emancipation.' Bill is now revising his dissertation in order to publish this as a monograph.
Olivia Sutherland recently passed her viva after completing her thesis titled: “The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel”
Her examiners noted, “The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel” is a theoretically ambitious project, with a coherent literary archive and a distinctive argument to make about representations of and orientations toward the future in a range of recent British and American Novels […] Its central argument, concerning the presence of a “vatic mode” in contemporary British and American fiction, examines different meanings of futurism: the defamiliarized and apocalyptic future of science fiction; the imagination of a specific literary work’s posthumous reception; the future of the novel form; and imaginative projections of the future. The novel, Sutherland argues, is not immune to the global and personal crises that cancel any sense of a sustainable or redemptive future. At the same time, the novel is not presentist, subservient to the “logic of the instant,” as Sutherland puts it, and is thus endowed with mediatory and critical facilities and a countervailing force […] The examiners were impressed by the performance and considered both the thesis and the examination to be an outstanding piece of work.’
