Dr Carrie Smith

(she/her)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My current research focuses on poetry on the radio. My previous research centred on literary manuscripts and poetic process. My published work on Ted Hughes focuses on questions of authenticity and voice in his poetry readings and recordings using original interviews and research undertaken in the BBC Written archive. I have also published on Hughes’s creative partnership with American artist Leonard Baskin, Hughes's animal poems and Hughes's textual engagement with the work of Sylvia Plath. My monograph The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes's Creative Process (Liverpool University Press, October 2021) is the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process making extensive use of the writer’s literary archives. It explores Hughes’s composition techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. I co-edited a collection titled The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (Routledge, 2013) which draws together archivists and literary scholars to think through the multifaceted nature of archival study. 

Research interests

• modern literary manuscripts
• poetic process and development in manuscripts drafts
• Ted Hughes
• History/literature of BBC radio
• voice and regional accents in 20th century BBC radio broadcasting
• the creative process of ekphrasis
• archival study
• archives and memory

Selected conference papers

‘Gazing at Ophelia, Veronica and Sylvia: The Manuscript Drafts of Ted Hughes’s Cave Birds’, Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words and Fragments, Ulster University, Belfast, 11th November 2017.

‘Ted Hughes and the Poetry of Process: the shock of writing Crow’, ‘Archival Afterlives’: Postwar Poetry in English, The John Rylands Research Institute Conference 2017, Manchester University, 27–29 June 2017.

‘A different kind of roots and branches: resisting the patriarchal family tree, alternative female inheritances in Orlando’, International Virginia Woolf conference, Leeds Trinity University, 16th-20th June 2016.

‘Chasing ‘Skylarks’: an archival exploration of the early drafts’, Conference Ted Hughes: Dream as Deep as England, Sheffield University, 9th-12th September 2015.

‘The Composition footprint of “The Hawk in the Rain”’, Ted Hughes Society Conference, Pembroke College, Cambridge, 14th-15th September 2012.

‘Audio recordings and the “myth” of Ted Hughes’, Conference “Ted Hughes: from Cambridge to ‘Collected’”, Cambridge University, 15th -18th September 2010.

Invited talks

‘The photographs are for Ted’: Photography as poetic process in the manuscript drafts of Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin's Remains of Elmet', University of Huddersfield, English Literature Research Seminar, 9th March 2018.

‘Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters: An Archive of Writing’, GENESIS HELSINKI: Creative Processes and Archives in Arts and Humanities, Finnish Literature Society (SKS), Helsinki, 7th-9th June 2017

‘The manuscripts of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University, 21st February 2017.

‘Student video projects in the Archive’, Remediating the Archive workshop, Cardiff University, 9th December 2016. (Funded by the GW4 Building Communities Initiator Grant)

Hay on Wye Literary Festival, on the panel ‘Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected’, 2nd June 2016

Cardiff Children’s Literature Festival panel ‘A Welsh Dahl?’, 21st April 2016

Teaching

At undergraduate level I have taught the following option modules:

• Poetry in the Making: Modern Literary Manuscripts
• Conflict and Composition: World War One Poetry in Manuscript Form
• Modernist Fictions
• 'Shock of the New': Literature 1900-1953
• Modernism/Modernity
• ˜The Post-1945 American Novel
• ˜The Twentieth Century Novel in the British Isles
• Introduction to the Novel and Poetry
• Star Cross'd Lovers: The Politics of Desire

At Masters Level I have taught:

• Modern American Women Poets and Material Culture
• Modernisms
• Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries
• Woolf's Modernism

I am happy to supervise PhDs in the following areas: manuscript and archival study, material culture, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, 1950s/60s British poetry, Modernism, Virgina Woolf.

Biography

I joined Cardiff University as a Lecturer in English Literature in September 2013, after receiving my PhD (2013) from the University of Exeter.

I co-founded the  Ted Hughes Society Journal and currently sit on its Council. 

Professional memberships

Fellow, Higher Education Academy

Supervisions

I am happy to supervise PhDs in the following areas:

• Manuscript and archival study
• Material culture
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• History/literature of BBC radio
• 1950s/60s British poetry
• contemporary poetry
• Modernism
• Virginia Woolf

Current supervision

Philipa Fincher, "Friendship Is The Basis Of Feminism”: An Exploration Of Cultural Creations Of Friendship And Their Interaction With Contemporary Feminist Discourse, co supervised with Becky Munford, 2021- University of Cardiff

Second Supervisor

Rebekah Sloane Mather, 'Works Of Many Hands: Nurses Autograph Books And Military Culture In And After WW1', Second Supervisor, University of Cardiff.

Josie Cray, 'Proceed from the Dream Outwards': Surrealist Experiments in the work of Anaïs Nin', Second Supervisor, 2022-, University of Cardiff

Previous supervision

Josie Cray, 'Proceed from the Dream Outwards': Surrealist Experiments in the work of Anaïs Nin', Lead Supervisior (Leave cover) 2021-2022, University of Cardiff

Amber Jenkins, ‘From Pen to Print: Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Art of Literary Composition’, Lead supervisor 12 months parental leave cover, 2015-2016, University of Cardiff.