Dr Laura Jayne Wright, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

What will your research seek to do?

I began my research by thinking about female expressions of trauma, panic, and pain through explorations of the voice. I treat sound as a conduit for the inexpressible while drawing important connections between early modern and contemporary women's writing. More recently, my study of the voice has evolved into work on voice-hearing and audiations (sonic visions or hallucinatory experiences). I am interested in women as both receivers and makers of inexplicable and often nonverbalised sound in moments of extreme emotional distress, religious fervour, or pain.

This work was developed from previous research interests in sound (Sound Effects: Hearing the Early Modern Stage, my first monograph, came out this year) and in women's experiences in speaking up, especially around politics (my Element, Shakespeare's Visionary Women, was recently published by Cambridge University Press). I wanted to develop this work by thinking about women who speak (or scream, or cry) under conditions of trauma.

What have you been up to recently? 

In the last two years, I have visited a lot of archives, including in Oxford, London, Cambridge, and Stratford-upon-Avon, and taken part in several opportunities to share work with other scholars. I’ve presented research in Minneapolis, Gothenburg, and, closer to home, I was part of an International Women’s Day research event at Newcastle.

My fellowship has also seen the completion of several publications: my monograph, my Element, an introduction for the Oxford Worlds Classics edition of Henry VIII, and a chapter on the dangers of whistling in the seventeenth century!

A highlight has been spending two months in Canberra as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University where I shared work on visionary experiences in and after the civil wars. 

What have you got planned for the year ahead?

This year I am concentrating on sonic experience and its connections to the emotions.

I am interested in voice-hearers such as Anna Trapnel and Sarah Wight, as well as representations of audiations and voice-hearing onstage. I’m sharing work on sound at conferences in Helsinki, Cambridge, and Boston. 

Now that you have started your Fellowship, what advice would you give to someone starting something similar?

Follow your research and follow your interests. The Fellowship gives you time to take a breath and read widely: it can lead you in unexpected directions, and that’s to be encouraged. My work, which began as a study of screams, is now as much about hearing traumatic sounds as making them, and that has only made it richer.