Book Authored by Dr. Laura Kremmel Wins Prestigious Award

A book authored by Dr. Laura Kremmel, assistant professor of English, was selected by the British Association for Romantic Studies as one of its four First Book Prize recipients. The prestigious award is given biennially for the best first monograph in romantic studies to encourage and recognize original, ground-breaking and interdisciplinary work in the literature and culture of the period c. 1780-1830.

"Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies," was chosen as one of the two runners-up for the award because of the originality of Dr. Kremmel's approach and the rigorous scholarship underpinning her cogent argument.

In her book, Dr. Kremmel examines the interplay between medicine and Gothic literature in the Romantic period (18th and 19th centuries) and argues that Gothic literature's roots in material culture and sociopolitical transgression make it uniquely situated to provide subversive answers to the era's emerging medical questions that challenge the very definitions of what a body is or can be. By comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavory tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, Dr. Kremmel argues that the Gothic's prioritization of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless.

"While major studies of the Gothic and medicine focus on the Victorian period, my work insists that the disorderly, inconsistent medical systems and marketplaces of the Romantic period provide an expansive wealth of emerging medical theories and applications," she said. "When I began visiting medical museums like the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh, and the Hunterian Museum in London, I noticed that the narratives surrounding medicine of the 18th and 19th centuries functioned similarly to Gothic literature and that applying the Gothic to medicine might open up new interpretations."

Situated in historicized readings of medical topics still relevant today, Dr. Kremmel points to the Gothic's focus on Othered and unvalued bodies that mirrors anatomist Matthew Baillie's ground-breaking work on morbid (or diseased) anatomy, both ambivalently responding to the era's growing interest in establishing "the norm" as a medical classification. Each chapter takes on a major Gothic trope and a contentious medical debate grounded in wider social justice issues, including vitalism, pain management, depression, dissection, disability, contagion, vaccination, narrative medicine, and public health.

"Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies" was also shortlisted for the International Gothic Association Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for a monograph best advancing the field of gothic studies. Judges noted that "This wonderful book makes the case that Romantic-era Gothic's engagement with medical debates is a vital but often ignored contribution to medical Gothic and medical horror studies. Fantastic research, intriguing detail, and exceptional scholarly rigour make this a fascinating and vitally important work."

In addition to this book, Dr. Kremmel is the author of several articles and chapters in publications including Religious Horror and the Ecogothic, Studies in Gothic Fiction, and The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, which won this year's Justin D. Edwards Prize for the edited collection best advancing the field of Gothic studies offered by the International Gothic Association. Her chapter in that collection is "Medical Globalgothic: Organ Harvesting and the Red Market." She is also co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature.

Dr. Kremmel holds a Ph.D. and a master's degree in English from Lehigh University, an MLitt in Gothic studies from the University of Stirling (Scotland), and a bachelor's degree in English from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The British Association for Romantic Studies is the UK's leading national organization for promoting the study of Romanticism. Founded in 1989, BARS acts as a hub for scholarship by organizing and supporting conferences, disseminating news and events, providing bursaries and prizes to early career researchers, publishing a bulletin, and establishing links with sister organizations. It also provides a voice for the subject area both within and beyond higher education.

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