Mobility and the Humanities

Over the past twenty years there has been something of a ‘mobilities turn’ across many disciplines in the social sciences. This book charts the increasing influence this turn is having on scholars in the arts and humanities, tracing the importance of questions and feelings of movement to scholars and arts practitioners across fields such as literary studies, historical geography, history, poetry and film. The book outlines what a mobilities turn might look like in the arts and humanities, tracing a genealogy of humanities engagements with themes of movement and mobility, and examining the different methods and textual sources humanities scholars have deployed. The book is uniquely positioned to speak to two audiences: mobilities scholars in the social sciences interested in learning more about how literary and cultural texts may be incorporated into their research, and researchers in the humanities who have only recently discovered that their thematic, or conceptual interest, in movement and mobility speaks directly to theories and philosophies that have circulated in the social sciences. This diverse and stimulating collection demonstrates the potential for future intellectual dialogues and creative collaborations around the theme of mobility. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Mobilities journal.

Peter Merriman is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK. His research focuses on histories and geographies of mobility, with a particular focus on driving in Britain. His previous books include: Mobility, Space and Culture (2012), Geographies of Mobilities (co-edited 2011), and The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (co-edited 2014).

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Lancaster University, UK. Having published widely in the fields of feminist theory and romance studies, her mobilities-related publications include Devolving Identities (ed.) (2000), Postcolonial Manchester (co-authored, 2013) and Drivetime (2016). She is currently Director for the Humanities at Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research.