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Master Class: Dr Ewan Jones (University of Cambridge) on ‘Fatigue: A Computational History (and what it allows)’

co-organised with Jan Rupp (RCSC)

When

Jul 22, 2025 from 10:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

SR 109 (GCSC) & Online (BBB)

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Fatigue: A Computational History (and what it allows)
 
How should we compose the as-yet-unwritten history of fatigue? One answer might hazard that we extend the genealogies of the concept that do currently exist – which concentrate on fatigue primarily as a consequence of industrial modernity – back into early cultures. What does it mean to be tired, before the economic development of productivity charted so brilliantly by Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, or the terrifying accounts of perfected sleeplessness in Jonathan Crary’s 24/7? 
 
Such an itinerary would have several merits; yet this talk takes a different tack, charting instead a more computational approach to conceptual change across the longue durée. Utilising tools developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab – an interdisciplinary network of intellectual historians and computer scientists – it demonstrates how the earlier eighteenth-century concept of fatigue developed, to large part by being embedded in a wider discursive field of scientific approaches to the nervous system. Bringing digital and analogue forms of reading into substantive dialogue, I will then demonstrate firstly, how this conception of nervous fatigue survives into literary criticism; secondly, how it might be incorporated into the accounts we give of the experience of poetry (with its capacity for productive exhaustion); and lastly, how these separate strands might encourage us to think anew our pedagogical practice, which, so far from encouraging undivided vigilance, might explore the useful ways in which our focus wavers. 
 
Bio:
Ewan Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on digital humanities, intellectual history, and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Close Reading as Attentional Practice, a collection of essays co-edited with Marion Thain, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press later this year.