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Dr Sarah Collins, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

Research updates, insights and future plans

Meet the researcher

Profile: Dr Sarah Collins

Project title: Darkness, Fear, and Agency in the Nineteenth-Century City 

Start date: 1 October 2022

End date: 30 September 2025

School: School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Sarah Collins Headshot

What will your research seek to do?

Darkness, Fear, and Agency in the Nineteenth-Century City explicitly examines the unique properties of nocturnal urban environments in American and British cities. It analyses fear as a nuanced emotion that encapsulated feelings of anxiety, nervousness, and depression during the nineteenth century, and, crucially, considers the management strategies, such as light installation and policing that were implemented to relieve fear.

My work aligns with the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of Night Studies, underscoring the contributions to be made by the humanities, which is important within current debates about light pollution.

The project is identifying two key findings:

  1. Nocturnal cities were emotional landscapes. Working across disciplines (e.g. literature, psychology, art history) is resulting in new ways of thinking about how fear of darkness was expressed in the past, which is not dissimilar to the present.
  2. Nocturnal spaces highlight the entanglement between darkness and inequality in the past, but this continues to be a problem within current nocturnal strategies.

How have you found your first year?

The first two years of my project have been full of amazing research trips where I have discovered documents in the archives that I never thought possible. I have been lucky enough to visit:

  • London
  • Plymouth
  • Glasgow
  • New York City
  • Savannah (GA)
  • Charleston (SC)

Every trip has provided a light-bulb moment. Some of the hidden gems have been finding engineering maps with streetlights displayed on them, which is helping me understand how varied lighting was in the past and informing my understanding of what nighttime felt like in the nineteenth century. 

 

Heat map of street light distribution 1894

Heat map of street light distribution, 1894

St Mary's Cathedral was located close to Pink Lane, a narrow back-street used by sex workers. The street had the highest distribution of public lights to street-size in Newcastle.

 

My work aligns with the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of Night Studies, underscoring the contributions to be made by the humanities, which is important within current debates about light pollution.

Dr Sarah Collins

What have you got planned for the year ahead?

During my last year I will be focusing on project outputs.

The project monograph, Darkness, Fear, and Agency in the Nineteenth-Century City: Blinded by the Light, will be published by Routledge in 2026. 

 

The Leverhulme Trust

Dr Sarah Collins is supported by the Leverhulme Trust as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, allowing her to carry out the work she has outlined above.

Since its foundation in 1925, the Leverhulme Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education, funding research projects, fellowships, studentships, bursaries and prizes; it operates across all the academic disciplines, the intention being to support talented individuals as they realise their personal vision in research and professional training. Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £100 million a year. For more information about the Trust, please visit www.leverhulme.ac.uk and follow the Trust on Twitter/X @LeverhulmeTrust

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