Good news!

Huge congratulations to James Fenton, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for his exciting project “Virtual Realities of the American Civil War, 1865-1933”.

The abstract for James’s project can be found below.

“This project will offer fresh interpretations of the American Civil War’s postbellum life, arguing that the drive to memorialise the war accelerated the development of immersion and interaction as key qualities in new media forms and technologies. Structured around critically-neglected texts and objects, including phonographic battle scenes, cycloramas of combat, dialect poetry, and war games, the project will argue that the virtualising qualities of these media were leveraged to make and unmake memories of the war. The project will thus offer a historicised account of virtual reality before computing and reveal the Civil War’s role in accelerating its world-marking capabilities.”