What are you working on at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
I am currently preparing a postdoctoral research project that looks at arboreal agency and human-arboreal entanglements in medieval North Atlantic religious cultures. It focuses on the eco-emotions of religiosity triggered by and conveyed through trees in early medieval Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland, drawing on insights from archaeology, codicology, intellectual history, and combined neurocognitive and ecocritical poetics. It endeavours to explore, through both textual and material evidence, how trees are cognitively perceived and rhetorically constructed in early medieval North Atlantic emotional and religious life, especially the roles enacted by trees in interreligious mediation in this area at the turn of Christianisation.
What activity or aspect of Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
Particularly intriguing for me is the integration of neurocognitive poetics and history of emotion into medieval literary studies, which is a signature and point of strength of the Eco-Emotions project in Oslo. This line of inquiry is also central to my own work, and I am excited at the opportunity of exchanging ideas and presenting papers-in-progess in Oslo, in the hope that congenial scholars and friends will help me sharpen my arguments. Inspired by the publications of the Oslo team in Eco-Emotions, I have been commissioned to write two journal articles, both of which are expected to be completed during my stay in Norway. One is on the cognitive references to bed and embeddedness in the Pearl-Poet's expressions of religiosity; the other is on embodied cognition and kinesic intelligence in female hagiographies, which explores Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist hagiographies vis-à-vis multilingual Christian traditions in Europe.
What do you currently read for pleasure?
I am currently reading "Jesuit literature" for pleasure, especially Jesuit translation and rewriting of Christian theology in premodern China. The Chinese used (or invented) by them is linguistically characteristic, not at all native but featuring cross-lingual contact and a balanced synthesis of different mentalities. The texts are very learned, where traditional Chinese traces are interlaced with Western learnings. Apart from the pleasure of reading, these texts also offer me insights in researching Sino-European interreligious mediation through missionaries; perhaps I will find eco-emotions therein as well.