Quarantine and typhus in the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell. (360G-Wellcome-101771_Z_13_Z)

This grant is requested to cover travel, subsistence, and photocopying costs for two research trips to the Wellcome Library. I will spend two weeks in February and one week in March 2013 conducting research into (i) nineteenth-century quarantine legislation and procedures in Britain (ii) nineteenth-century typhus epidemics, their association with military campaigns and the Irish famine, and William Jenner's differentiation of typhus and typhoid in 1850. There will be two research outputs: (i) an essay on quarantine and typhus in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1853 novel 'Ruth' to be published in the forthcoming edited collection 'Place, Progress, and Personhood in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell', edited by Emily Morris, Sarina Gruver Moore, and Lesa Scholl; (ii) a conference presentation on quarantine, mobility and typhus epidemics in Gaskell's writing at the joint conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association, the British Association of Victorian Studies, and the Australasian Vi ctorian Studies Association in June 2013. I am also proposing a paper based on this research for the Association for Medical Humanities conference in July 2013, for which the conference theme is Global Medical Humanities.