Clare Brant is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature & Culture in the Department of English at King’s, and co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research. She is an editor on the European Journal of Life Writing, and the Project Director of Strandlines, a digital community project about lives on the Strand, past, present and creative. Besides co-editing seven essay collections, she has published on a wide range of subjects in both the eighteenth century and contemporary life including letters, balloons, gender, smell, cuttlefish, travel writing and visual arts; what connects them is an interest in the history of ideas.
Clare & the Ego-Media Project
Clare’s Ego-Media projects have involved researching digital forms of life writing. She co-curated an exhibition with Dr Polly North of The Great Diary Project. ‘Dear Diary: A Celebration of Diaries and their Digital Descendants’, which ran at the Inigo Rooms in Somerset House in 2017. She has been exploring the concept of imaginative agency as well as writing and thinking about the diary form and its evolution into the digital landscape.
Clare’s research
Clare explores a wide range of subjects in the long eighteenth century and contemporary culture. She is interested in most forms of literature (especially poetry) and the history of ideas and human lives.
Watch Professor Clare Brant talk about Ego Media
Her book, Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain 1783-1786 explores imaginative responses to balloons in literature, material and visual culture as well as the history of technology and science. Her previous book Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture won the ESSE Book Award in 2008. Besides these, she has edited John Gay’s Trivia (1716) and co-edited seven essay collections. She is a Series Editor (with Max Saunders) of Palgrave’s Studies in Life Writing, and co-directs the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s.
Clare is currently working on underwater lives, especially aquanautics, and the relations between literature and science in marine and environmental contexts. Her project encompasses underwater photography, film and other arts.
