Dr Caitlin DeSilvey

Contact:

Name: Dr Caitlin DeSilvey

Job Title: Lecturer

Room: Peter Lanyon, AO92

Email:  C.O.Desilvey@exeter.ac.uk

Telephone: +44 (0) 1326 254 161

Fax: +44 (0)1326 371859

Qualifications:

BA (Yale), MSc (Edinburgh), PhD (Open University)

Broad research specialisms:

My research explores the cultural significance of material transience. I began to think critically about this subject while working in ghost towns and abandoned homesteads in the American West, where the materials I came up against forced me to question the assumption that remembrance must proceed from resilience. I became curious about the kind of stories it is possible to tell when things fall apart, when cultural memory is produced in relation to ephemeral materials.

More recently I’ve been thinking about how an engagement with the aesthetics and the ecologies of decay might offer resources for alternative interpretation of the material past, a kind of entropic heritage practice. Current testing-grounds for these ideas include an abandoned cobbler’s shop, threatened coastal heritage properties, and Cold War ruins.

At the moment I’m interested in questions of communication and story-telling. Is it possible to frame an appreciation for process over preservation, to see letting go as something other than loss? How can we narrate the transience of cultural matter in a way that acknowledges the energies and agencies of the physical and biological world? These questions have sparked collaborations with photographers and visual artists and experiments with creative writing practice.

Biography:

I graduated from Yale University in 1994 with a BA in Religious Studies and Environmental Studies. I then spent six years working as a community organiser in Missoula, Montana before moving to the UK to complete a MSc in Cultural Geography at the University of Edinburgh in 2001. I went on to the Open University Geography Discipline to undertake my PhD, entitled 'Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead'. I was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Exeter-Cornwall in September 2007. I am a member of the Historical and Cultural Geography Research Group.

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