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 at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. Her current research project is titled 'Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola' and is part of the NWO Startersbeurs project 'Tracing Players Playing Traces: Non/Human Music in Modern and Contemporary Literature' led by her colleague Dr Daný van Dam. 'Posthuman Music Machines' studies literature and culture from the age of the player piano (1896-1929) in order to understand how literary engagements with this new media technology shaped and were shaped by wider attitudes to automatic music and technology.
More information about Ruth Clemens
Fields of interest
- Modernism and the avant-garde
- Experimental literature
- Poetry and poetics
- Critical approaches to language, representation, media, and technology
- Translation, multilingualism, and transnationalism
- Sound studies
- The relationship between form and politics
- Critical posthumanism
- Book history, 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 narratives and music technologies. My research project, 'Posthuman Music Machines: Media and Culture in the Age of the Pianola,' studies images, films, texts, and compositions 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 attitudes to automatic music and the technological.
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.
Postdoctoral researcher
- Faculty of Humanities
- Centre for the Arts in Society
- Modern English Literature
- 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. & Flannery B. (2023), Soy Boy, meme ecology, and the fascist imaginary. In: Braidotti R. & Dolphijn R. (Eds.), Deleuze and Guattari and fascism. Deleuze Connections. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- 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.