James Smith, 'Toxic Emotions: Riparian Personification and Pollution'

Emotions Make History

James L. Smith is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on intellectual history, medieval abstractions and visualisation schemata, environmental humanities and water history. His first monograph, Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism was published by Brepols in 2017. James is the editor of The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (Punctum, 2017), and co-editor of a themed collection for the Open Library of the Humanities on ‘New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies’ (forthcoming, 2018). He is currently shaping a digital/environmental humanities project titled ‘Deep Mapping the Spiritual Waterscape of Ireland’s Lakes: The Case of Loch Derg, Donegal’. This paper, ‘Toxic Emotions: Riparian Personification and Pollution, Past, Present and Future’, was delivered at ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’ at The University of Western Australia, in June 2018.