About
Dr James L. Smith is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow based in the department of geography at Trinity College Dublin. He focuses on intellectual history, cultural and spiritual geography, ecocriticism, digital humanities, environmental humanities, spatial humanities and water history. His first monograph is
Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism (Brepols, 2018). James is the editor of
The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (punctum books, 2017), and co-editor of the Open Library of the Humanities collection
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies (2019).
His 2018-20 postdoctoral project is entitled ‘Deep Mapping the Spiritual Waterscape of Ireland’s Lakes: The Case of Lough Derg, Donegal’.
James is also the convener of a spatial humanities reading group based at the Long Room Hub. He is the PI of
Aquatic Cultures and the Digital Environmental Humanities (ACDEH) and a committee member of the
International Spatial Humanities Sprint Camp (iSHCamp).
Education
PhD, History (Medieval and Early Modern Studies), University of Western Australia, August 2014
BA, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Political Science and International Relations, University of Western Australia, 2007
Honours (Medieval and Early Modern Studies), First Class (1A), 2008
Thesis: ‘Water as Medieval Intellectual Entity: Case Studies in Twelfth-Century Western Monasticism’, University of Western AustraliaWork Shared in CORE
Books
Articles
- EcoGothic, Ecohorror and Apocalyptic Entanglement in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Tales of the Black Freighter
- Interrogating Green Space in Medieval Monasticism: Position, Powers and Politics
- Medieval Water Studies: Past, Present and Promise
- Medieval Water Energies: Philosophical, Hydro-Social, and Intellectual
- Disturbing the Ant-Hill: Misanthropy and Cosmic Indifference in Clark Ashton Smith’s Medieval Averoigne
- Brendan meets Columbus: A more commodious islescape
- I, River?: New materialism, riparian non-human agency and the scale of democratic reform
- Philosophia Divitur: The Ecodiagrammatic Patterns of the Pierpont Morgan, M. 982 Leaf
- “So the satiated man hungers, the drunken thirsts” The Medieval Rhetorical Topos of Spiritual Nutrition
- Europe’s confused transmutation: the realignment of moral cartography in Juan de la Cosa’s Mappa Mundi (1500)
- Premodern Streams of Thought in Twenty-First-Century Water Management
- New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialisms
Book chapters
Conference proceedings
Theses
Projects
Deep Mapping the Spiritual Waterscape of Lakes: The Case of Lough Derg, County Donegal Veronica Strang has called our spiritual fascination with water ‘hydrolatry’, a lingering veneration that goes beyond religion affecting social behaviour in an era of scientific instrumentality and commodification. It is part of the Irish psyche, and contains a reservoir of spiritual history waiting to be delved. As Jamie Linton puts it, ‘[w]e mix language, gods, bodies, and thought with water to produce the worlds and the selves we inhabit’. There is a need to provide histories that reveal this admixture in greater depth, and make it accessible to a variety of interpretations. This project builds a vision of water spanning Ireland’s long spiritual history that will strengthen the cultural resonance of place and space in the face of unprecedented bio-ethical, heritage, environmental, and climate challenges. The methodology is deep mapping, the capture of a wide range of spatio-temporal material focused on a small geographical area. The final result will be an online archive consisting of literary, social science, natural science, and multi-media collections.
