Emilie Taylor-Pirie
*I do not regularly update this page; for details of publications please visit: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/taylor-pirie-emilie.aspx
I am currently a Leverhulme EC fellow at Birmingham working on a book project about Britain’s first Nobel laureate, Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932). Before this I was a postdoctoral research fellow on the Diseases of Modern Life project at St Anne's College, Oxford.
I specialise in literature and science studies, medical humanities, and the cultural history of medicine, especially in the long nineteenth century. I have an interdisciplinary background with a BSc (hons.) in biology and higher degrees in the humanities. My PhD, which I was awarded by the University of Warwick in 2016, was generously founded by the Wolfson foundation. My research interests include: Victorian literature and culture, particularly Gothic fiction and the scientific romance; postcolonialism, especially as it pertains to narratives of disease; and SciComm and popular science, primarily in relation to parasitology and gut health.
My first book Empire Under the Microscope: Parasitology and the British Literary Imagination, 1885-1935 is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan’s Literature, Science, and Medicine series.
My second book project, "Possessing Our Own Bodies: Gut Health in Victorian Culture" is concerned with changing understandings of gastrointestinal health throughout the nineteenth century. Heavily influenced by the burgeoning field of microbiome studies, the book asks "What did gut health mean to the Victorians and why should we care?"
I am currently a Leverhulme EC fellow at Birmingham working on a book project about Britain’s first Nobel laureate, Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932). Before this I was a postdoctoral research fellow on the Diseases of Modern Life project at St Anne's College, Oxford.
I specialise in literature and science studies, medical humanities, and the cultural history of medicine, especially in the long nineteenth century. I have an interdisciplinary background with a BSc (hons.) in biology and higher degrees in the humanities. My PhD, which I was awarded by the University of Warwick in 2016, was generously founded by the Wolfson foundation. My research interests include: Victorian literature and culture, particularly Gothic fiction and the scientific romance; postcolonialism, especially as it pertains to narratives of disease; and SciComm and popular science, primarily in relation to parasitology and gut health.
My first book Empire Under the Microscope: Parasitology and the British Literary Imagination, 1885-1935 is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan’s Literature, Science, and Medicine series.
My second book project, "Possessing Our Own Bodies: Gut Health in Victorian Culture" is concerned with changing understandings of gastrointestinal health throughout the nineteenth century. Heavily influenced by the burgeoning field of microbiome studies, the book asks "What did gut health mean to the Victorians and why should we care?"
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (25)
Uploads
Publications by Emilie Taylor-Pirie
This dynamic connection between mind and body is of course two way; in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Carmilla asserts: ‘If I could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better digestion,’ whilst in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), George Gilbert considers Sophronia’s patchy blushing ‘from a professional point of view’ and mistakes her emotion for indigestion, suggesting that the two might be interchangeable. Indeed, Dickens’s All The Year Round published an article in 1867 that claimed that it was the stomach not the heart that was the seat of the emotions. ‘A damaged stomach causes melancholy, disgust, envy, hatred’, the author asserts, while those ‘negative’ emotions might too cause upset of the digestive capacity. Elsewhere, physicians were developing frameworks that constituted indigestion in relation to the experiences of modernity. John Milner Fothergill, for example, argued that it was town life that bred dyspepsia, producing petite, over-sensitive women, who read novels and could not eat wheat.
These several connections between stomach and mind are part of a wider discourse constructing gastrointestinal health in the nineteenth century. In this essay, I will explore how digestive and emotional health were understood in tandem. The sometimes indistinguishable boundary between being hungry and being angry, which we might experience in the twenty-first century, was, in the nineteenth, a boundary that encoded gendered and classed expressions of selfhood. To be ‘hangry’ in this time-period, was to be somatically imbalanced and critically unmindful of the ‘philosophy of the stomach’.
Conferences by Emilie Taylor-Pirie
The ability to replicate the conditions of an experiment and to reproduce the same experimental results was paramount to proving the mosquito-malaria theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Ross’s experiments with birds proved that mosquitoes transmitted avian malaria from host to host, and by analogy, that they transmitted human malaria by the same process. However, when Italian competitors proved this definitively by replicating his experiments in humans, Ross took to the medical press to rail against their experiments as scientific ’piracy’, and their claims over the discovery as ‘petty larceny’ in science.
Replication at the end of the nineteenth century was essential because it provided scientific authority, but controversial, for the very same reason. Using Ross’s mosquito-malaria work as a case study, I will explore the politics of replication in all its forms—as a scientific methodology, as an ideological motif, and as a framework that exposes the politics of priority disputes. While in speeches Ross referred to priority as ‘petty inter-tribal advantage’, it was a qualm that clearly haunted him for his entire career, leading him to write in 1924 that he regretted ever investigating malaria. ‘Humanity’, he argued, ‘[was] not worth it!’
He was a true Knight of Science...the Galahad of that Group of enthusiastic young men who, with so little recompense for themselves, have pushed forward the cause of tropical medical science at such a rapid rate.
The accolade ‘Knight of Science’ reflects tellingly on the author, fellow parasitologist Ronald Ross, and gestures more broadly to the romanticized construction of scientific expeditions. The implication here is that Dutton fought on behalf of science, risking his own life to propagate and advance tropical medicine as a discipline. Sir William McGregor similarly lionizes the profession in an address given at the London School of Tropical Medicine in 1900, ‘you will in all probability be able to establish the existence of maladies at present unknown and unrecognized […] can any man desire greater glory?' The ‘glory’ associated with scientific research – particularly research in the colonies – is a concept propagated by its association with the broadening of frontiers (both figurative and literal), but, for parasitologist Ronald Ross, an unfulfilled ideal that he struggles with his entire career. How far is this ‘glory’ a true reflection on scientific pursuits or a constructed cultural image? In this paper I will explore the ‘branding’ of Parasitology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the appropriation of Arthurian narratives to fashion a scientific sub-discipline intimately bound up with National Identity and the prerogatives of Empire.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Jekyll battles with a bodily duality as the parasitic Mr Hyde struggles to dominate him, ‘the powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll’. Mr Hyde is a self-inflicted parasite, created by Jekyll in a scientific experiment. In an attempt to separate the 'composite' nature of man, he creates a monster. This monster is, however, still part of himself, ‘I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.’ Jekyll’s parasite shakes the very foundations of identity by being both self and non-self, both tangible and elusive. He represents the anxiety of identity – both mental and somatic, and explores the transgression of bodily boundaries. What happens when our bodies become hosts to another identity? Where does host stop and parasite begin? In this paper I will explore the anxieties surrounding the figure of the parasite as invader and saboteur. Tracing the parasite from its etymological heritage as a religious icon through social caricature to it's increasingly biological connotation in the nineteenth century, I will analyse the parasite as a compromising influence on, not only bodily integrity but also personal identity. I will discuss three texts situated throughout the nineteenth century in order to demonstrate these changing ideas about parasitic relationships: Honore de Balzac's 'Cousin Pons' (1847), Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (1886), and Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Parasite' (1894).
Leonardo DiCaprio’s opening lines in the academy award-winning film Inception offers an unconventional depiction of the parasite. The notion that something as intangible as an idea could be a parasite reflects its elusive classification in contemporary culture. What is a parasite? From the greek parasitos meaning ‘one who eats at the table of another’, the parasite is defined uniquely, not by what type of organism it is, but by how it lives its life. This broad classification provides a rich literary potential for the figure of the parasite, the social origin of the word further complicating definition by adding another semantic dimension. As the field of parasitology has developed, more attention has been given to this biological phenomenon, and as our knowledge of the parasite has evolved so too has its popular representation. However I believe the broadening of classification in the scientific community has been carried over to the literary domain and results in the modern-day use and abuse of this popular scientific concept, with literary critics and authors alike employing the figure of the parasite to fit their own agendas. In this paper I will illustrate a marginalization of biological depictions and an increase in the use of the parasite as an abstract concept, often demarcating any unwanted or potentially negative relationship. I will explore the various depictions of the parasite in popular culture and examine the relationship between this much-abused metaphor and its scientific counterpart."
-- I am Legend (1954)
The chilling final lines of Richard Matheson’s ‘I am Legend’ neatly sum up the ‘modern’ conception of a monstrous future: one without human beings. Matheson’s heroic protagonist finds himself the last of a species, and in a clever subversion of past and present, realises that, like the vampires and demons of fiction, he is now nothing more than Legend. The antagonist of the novel - a parasitic virus - kills millions, the few survivors are transformed into a new species and the readership is presented with a post-human future. Inspired by media-inflamed pandemics such as Swine and Bird flu, Mad Cow Disease and SARS, the modern threat to the human race finds itself a new symbol – that of the super-virus. In this paper I will explore the fictional pandemic and the threat it poses to contemporary society. Using humans as vehicles for the transmission of their own downfall, the virus poses a potent threat. Insidious and relentless the fictional super-virus spreads itself through human-to-human contact meaning that civilisation and technological advancement often contribute to transmission. This new monster is chilling because it is, in classic horror movie style, largely invisible, resulting in a displaced fear, which is then projected onto the human carriers. In the British horror film ‘28 Days Later’ (2002) fear is transferred to the victims of the virus, the cut-throat ethos of the survivors and the jarring premonition of a future without civilisation. In a similar notion, ‘Nothing spreads like fear’ the tagline for the 2011 film ‘Contagion’ demonstrates the layered threat of the virus, causing mass hysteria, mistrust of authority and a dog-eat-dog outlook. The degeneration of the human begins, not with infection, but with the fear of infection, making the fictional pandemic popular culture’s most destructive monster."
This dynamic connection between mind and body is of course two way; in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Carmilla asserts: ‘If I could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better digestion,’ whilst in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), George Gilbert considers Sophronia’s patchy blushing ‘from a professional point of view’ and mistakes her emotion for indigestion, suggesting that the two might be interchangeable. Indeed, Dickens’s All The Year Round published an article in 1867 that claimed that it was the stomach not the heart that was the seat of the emotions. ‘A damaged stomach causes melancholy, disgust, envy, hatred’, the author asserts, while those ‘negative’ emotions might too cause upset of the digestive capacity. Elsewhere, physicians were developing frameworks that constituted indigestion in relation to the experiences of modernity. John Milner Fothergill, for example, argued that it was town life that bred dyspepsia, producing petite, over-sensitive women, who read novels and could not eat wheat.
These several connections between stomach and mind are part of a wider discourse constructing gastrointestinal health in the nineteenth century. In this essay, I will explore how digestive and emotional health were understood in tandem. The sometimes indistinguishable boundary between being hungry and being angry, which we might experience in the twenty-first century, was, in the nineteenth, a boundary that encoded gendered and classed expressions of selfhood. To be ‘hangry’ in this time-period, was to be somatically imbalanced and critically unmindful of the ‘philosophy of the stomach’.
The ability to replicate the conditions of an experiment and to reproduce the same experimental results was paramount to proving the mosquito-malaria theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Ross’s experiments with birds proved that mosquitoes transmitted avian malaria from host to host, and by analogy, that they transmitted human malaria by the same process. However, when Italian competitors proved this definitively by replicating his experiments in humans, Ross took to the medical press to rail against their experiments as scientific ’piracy’, and their claims over the discovery as ‘petty larceny’ in science.
Replication at the end of the nineteenth century was essential because it provided scientific authority, but controversial, for the very same reason. Using Ross’s mosquito-malaria work as a case study, I will explore the politics of replication in all its forms—as a scientific methodology, as an ideological motif, and as a framework that exposes the politics of priority disputes. While in speeches Ross referred to priority as ‘petty inter-tribal advantage’, it was a qualm that clearly haunted him for his entire career, leading him to write in 1924 that he regretted ever investigating malaria. ‘Humanity’, he argued, ‘[was] not worth it!’
He was a true Knight of Science...the Galahad of that Group of enthusiastic young men who, with so little recompense for themselves, have pushed forward the cause of tropical medical science at such a rapid rate.
The accolade ‘Knight of Science’ reflects tellingly on the author, fellow parasitologist Ronald Ross, and gestures more broadly to the romanticized construction of scientific expeditions. The implication here is that Dutton fought on behalf of science, risking his own life to propagate and advance tropical medicine as a discipline. Sir William McGregor similarly lionizes the profession in an address given at the London School of Tropical Medicine in 1900, ‘you will in all probability be able to establish the existence of maladies at present unknown and unrecognized […] can any man desire greater glory?' The ‘glory’ associated with scientific research – particularly research in the colonies – is a concept propagated by its association with the broadening of frontiers (both figurative and literal), but, for parasitologist Ronald Ross, an unfulfilled ideal that he struggles with his entire career. How far is this ‘glory’ a true reflection on scientific pursuits or a constructed cultural image? In this paper I will explore the ‘branding’ of Parasitology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the appropriation of Arthurian narratives to fashion a scientific sub-discipline intimately bound up with National Identity and the prerogatives of Empire.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Jekyll battles with a bodily duality as the parasitic Mr Hyde struggles to dominate him, ‘the powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll’. Mr Hyde is a self-inflicted parasite, created by Jekyll in a scientific experiment. In an attempt to separate the 'composite' nature of man, he creates a monster. This monster is, however, still part of himself, ‘I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.’ Jekyll’s parasite shakes the very foundations of identity by being both self and non-self, both tangible and elusive. He represents the anxiety of identity – both mental and somatic, and explores the transgression of bodily boundaries. What happens when our bodies become hosts to another identity? Where does host stop and parasite begin? In this paper I will explore the anxieties surrounding the figure of the parasite as invader and saboteur. Tracing the parasite from its etymological heritage as a religious icon through social caricature to it's increasingly biological connotation in the nineteenth century, I will analyse the parasite as a compromising influence on, not only bodily integrity but also personal identity. I will discuss three texts situated throughout the nineteenth century in order to demonstrate these changing ideas about parasitic relationships: Honore de Balzac's 'Cousin Pons' (1847), Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (1886), and Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Parasite' (1894).
Leonardo DiCaprio’s opening lines in the academy award-winning film Inception offers an unconventional depiction of the parasite. The notion that something as intangible as an idea could be a parasite reflects its elusive classification in contemporary culture. What is a parasite? From the greek parasitos meaning ‘one who eats at the table of another’, the parasite is defined uniquely, not by what type of organism it is, but by how it lives its life. This broad classification provides a rich literary potential for the figure of the parasite, the social origin of the word further complicating definition by adding another semantic dimension. As the field of parasitology has developed, more attention has been given to this biological phenomenon, and as our knowledge of the parasite has evolved so too has its popular representation. However I believe the broadening of classification in the scientific community has been carried over to the literary domain and results in the modern-day use and abuse of this popular scientific concept, with literary critics and authors alike employing the figure of the parasite to fit their own agendas. In this paper I will illustrate a marginalization of biological depictions and an increase in the use of the parasite as an abstract concept, often demarcating any unwanted or potentially negative relationship. I will explore the various depictions of the parasite in popular culture and examine the relationship between this much-abused metaphor and its scientific counterpart."
-- I am Legend (1954)
The chilling final lines of Richard Matheson’s ‘I am Legend’ neatly sum up the ‘modern’ conception of a monstrous future: one without human beings. Matheson’s heroic protagonist finds himself the last of a species, and in a clever subversion of past and present, realises that, like the vampires and demons of fiction, he is now nothing more than Legend. The antagonist of the novel - a parasitic virus - kills millions, the few survivors are transformed into a new species and the readership is presented with a post-human future. Inspired by media-inflamed pandemics such as Swine and Bird flu, Mad Cow Disease and SARS, the modern threat to the human race finds itself a new symbol – that of the super-virus. In this paper I will explore the fictional pandemic and the threat it poses to contemporary society. Using humans as vehicles for the transmission of their own downfall, the virus poses a potent threat. Insidious and relentless the fictional super-virus spreads itself through human-to-human contact meaning that civilisation and technological advancement often contribute to transmission. This new monster is chilling because it is, in classic horror movie style, largely invisible, resulting in a displaced fear, which is then projected onto the human carriers. In the British horror film ‘28 Days Later’ (2002) fear is transferred to the victims of the virus, the cut-throat ethos of the survivors and the jarring premonition of a future without civilisation. In a similar notion, ‘Nothing spreads like fear’ the tagline for the 2011 film ‘Contagion’ demonstrates the layered threat of the virus, causing mass hysteria, mistrust of authority and a dog-eat-dog outlook. The degeneration of the human begins, not with infection, but with the fear of infection, making the fictional pandemic popular culture’s most destructive monster."