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Kirsti Bohata

Swansea University, English Language and Literature, Faculty Member

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Professor of English Literature, and Director of CREW, the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW

Co-Chair of the Association for Welsh Writing in English

Co-I, Wellcome Trust Funded: Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of the Coalfields 1780-1948 www.dis-ind-soc.org

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Papers by Kirsti Bohata

"No one talks about it": using emotional methodologies to overcome climate silence and inertia in Higher Education

by Anna Pigott and Kirsti Bohata

Frontiers in Sociology, 2024

Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecolog... more Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecological crises (CEC) and, at worst, actively contributing to them by perpetuating particular ways of knowing, relating, and acting. Calls for HE to radically transform its activities in response to the polycrises abound, yet questions about how this will be achieved are often overlooked. This article proposes that a lack of capacity to express and share emotions about the CEC in universities is at the heart of their relative climate silence and inertia. We build a theoretical and experimental justification for the importance of climate emotions in HE, drawing on our collective experience of the Climate Lab project (2021–2023), a series of in-person and online workshops that brought together scientists, engineers, and artists. We analyse the roles of grief, vulnerability, and creativity in the conversations that occurred, and explore these exchanges as potential pathways out of socially organised climate denial in neoliberal institutions. By drawing on the emerging field of “emotional methodologies,” we make a case for the importance of emotionally reflexive practices for overcoming an institutionalised disconnect between feeling and knowing, especially in Western-disciplinary contexts. We suggest that if staff and students are afforded opportunities to connect with their emotions about the CEC, then institutional transformation is (a) more likely to happen and be meaningfully sustained and (b) less likely to fall into the same problematic patterns of knowledge and action that perpetuate these crises. This profound, sometimes uncomfortable, emotionally reflexive work is situated in the wider context of glimpsing decolonial futures for universities, which is an integral step towards climate and ecological justice.

An original thinker and economist who liked to smoke a ‘man’s cigar’

Western Mail and Wales Online, Wales History Month article on Amy Dillwy

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter

Green Letters

‘for Wales, see England?’ suffrage and the new woman in Wales [1]

Womens History Review, Dec 1, 2002

2, Miners partaking in exercises and handicraft at a rehabilitation centre, 1940s

List of figures

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Welsh Women’s Industrial Fiction 1880–1910

Routledge eBooks, Jun 4, 2020

From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development ... more From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development of industrial writing. Although prevented from gaining first-hand experience of the coalface, Welsh women writers were amongst the first to try to fictionalize those heavy industries-coal and metal in the south, and slate in the north-which dominated the lives of the majority of the late nineteenth-century Welsh population. Treatment of industrial matter is generally fragmentary in this early women's writing; industrial imagery and metaphor may be used in novels that are not primarily "about" industry at all. Yet from c. 1880-1910, Welsh women writers made a significant-and hitherto critically neglected-attempt to make sense in literature of contemporary industrial Wales in powerful and innovative ways. This essay maps their contribution and considers anglophone Welsh women writers' adaptations and innovations of form (particularly romance) as they try to find a way of representing industrial landscapes, communities and the daily realities of industrial labour. It identifies the genesis in women's writing of tropes that would become central to later industrial fiction, including depictions of industrial accident, injury, death and disability. And it explores the representation of social relations (class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) and conflict on this tumultuous, dangerous new stage. Women writers have been central to the development of the industrial novel, as with Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866). But the heavy industry that dominated in Wales-coal, iron, steel and quarrying-is notable for its absence in the early canonical novels by women (and men). 1 These industries were arguably less accessible to women writers with the necessary education and leisure to write than the factories which formed the basis of much of the early industrial fiction. There is a corresponding neglect in critical studies: in Susan Zlotnick's Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution, mining is mentioned just once, in passing relation to Felix Holt, and there is a similar dearth in relation to women writers in earlier studies by Martha Vicinus and Catherine

Select bibliography

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

List of abbreviations

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

List of abbreviations

Disability in industrial Britain, 2020

1, A miner is tested for nystagmus using ‘the head test’. From the First Report of the Miners’ Nystagmus Committee, 1922

Manchester University Press, 2020

Select bibliography

Disability in industrial Britain, Jan 7, 2020

A tolerant nation? : revisiting ethnic diversity in a devolved Wales

by Neil Evans and Kirsti Bohata

Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and... more Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and Charlotte Williams 1. Immigrants and Minorities in Wales, 1840 - 1990: A Comparative Perspective Neil Evans 2. Slaughter and Salvation: Welsh Missionary Activity and British Imperialism Jane Aaron 3. The Other Internationalism? Missionary Activity and Welsh Nonconformist Perceptions of the World in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Aled Jones 4. Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Literary Representations of the Racial and Gendered Other Kirsti Bohata 5. Wales and Africa : William Hughes and the Congo Institute Neil Evans and Ivor Wynne Jones 6. Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence: Riots and Racial Attacks in Wales, 1826 - 2014 Neil Evans 7. Playing the Game: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Modern Wales Neil Evans and Paul O'Leary 8. Changing the Archive: History and Memory as Cultural Politics in Multi-ethnic Wales Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon 9. Religious Diversity in Wales Paul ...

A tolerant nation? : revisiting ethnic diversity in a devolved Wales

Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and... more Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and Charlotte Williams 1. Immigrants and Minorities in Wales, 1840 - 1990: A Comparative Perspective Neil Evans 2. Slaughter and Salvation: Welsh Missionary Activity and British Imperialism Jane Aaron 3. The Other Internationalism? Missionary Activity and Welsh Nonconformist Perceptions of the World in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Aled Jones 4. Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Literary Representations of the Racial and Gendered Other Kirsti Bohata 5. Wales and Africa : William Hughes and the Congo Institute Neil Evans and Ivor Wynne Jones 6. Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence: Riots and Racial Attacks in Wales, 1826 - 2014 Neil Evans 7. Playing the Game: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Modern Wales Neil Evans and Paul O'Leary 8. Changing the Archive: History and Memory as Cultural Politics in Multi-ethnic Wales Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon 9. Religious Diversity in Wales Paul ...

On Working with Williams: Five Female Perspectives

Digital Libraries of Scholarly Editions

Pioneers and Radicals: The Dillwyn Family's Transatlantic Tradition of Dissent and Innovation

Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2018

The Dillwyn family made a significant contribution to the commercial, industrial, and artistic de... more The Dillwyn family made a significant contribution to the commercial, industrial, and artistic development of the city of Swansea in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Their legacy remains not only in their published works but also in a number of street names and placenames in Swansea and its surrounding areas. This paper looks at the work of key members of the Dillwyn family, beginning with the American abolitionist, William Dillwyn, and his wider family. As practising Quakers, the Dillwyns were driven by a particular work ethic that was both industrious and unconventional. The paper focuses on the pioneering accomplishments of the Dillwyn women, including the author Amy Dillwyn.

DILLWYN, ELIZABETH AMY (1845 - 1935), novelist, industrialist and feminist campaigner

Special Issue: Disability, Work and Representation: New Perspectives

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2017

‘Unhomely Moments’: Reading and Writing Nation in Welsh Female Gothic

The Female Gothic, 2009

Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent s... more Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent signifiers from its inception to the present. Family, ‘race’ and nation are evoked by the sense of the word house meaning ‘lineage’, making houses emblematic of nation. Houses are also used figuratively in Female Gothic writing to encode and deconstruct the female body and psyche. If houses have traditionally symbolised imprisoning structures of patriarchy by which women are confined and from which they must escape, the house is a potentially troubling and problematic Gothic trope of nation for those reading or writing female nationhood. One of the aims of this essay will be to consider how ideas of nation(hood) and gender intersect and complicate each other in twentieth-century Anglophone Welsh Female Gothic. A second aim is to indicate some common organising features, in addition to houses, that might be associated with ‘the Welsh Female Gothic’; this essay will suggest ruined buildings, fire, disease and mental illness as prominent images which express gender and cultural crisis.

"No one talks about it": using emotional methodologies to overcome climate silence and inertia in Higher Education

by Anna Pigott and Kirsti Bohata

Frontiers in Sociology, 2024

Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecolog... more Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecological crises (CEC) and, at worst, actively contributing to them by perpetuating particular ways of knowing, relating, and acting. Calls for HE to radically transform its activities in response to the polycrises abound, yet questions about how this will be achieved are often overlooked. This article proposes that a lack of capacity to express and share emotions about the CEC in universities is at the heart of their relative climate silence and inertia. We build a theoretical and experimental justification for the importance of climate emotions in HE, drawing on our collective experience of the Climate Lab project (2021–2023), a series of in-person and online workshops that brought together scientists, engineers, and artists. We analyse the roles of grief, vulnerability, and creativity in the conversations that occurred, and explore these exchanges as potential pathways out of socially organised climate denial in neoliberal institutions. By drawing on the emerging field of “emotional methodologies,” we make a case for the importance of emotionally reflexive practices for overcoming an institutionalised disconnect between feeling and knowing, especially in Western-disciplinary contexts. We suggest that if staff and students are afforded opportunities to connect with their emotions about the CEC, then institutional transformation is (a) more likely to happen and be meaningfully sustained and (b) less likely to fall into the same problematic patterns of knowledge and action that perpetuate these crises. This profound, sometimes uncomfortable, emotionally reflexive work is situated in the wider context of glimpsing decolonial futures for universities, which is an integral step towards climate and ecological justice.

An original thinker and economist who liked to smoke a ‘man’s cigar’

Western Mail and Wales Online, Wales History Month article on Amy Dillwy

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter

Green Letters

‘for Wales, see England?’ suffrage and the new woman in Wales [1]

Womens History Review, Dec 1, 2002

2, Miners partaking in exercises and handicraft at a rehabilitation centre, 1940s

List of figures

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Welsh Women’s Industrial Fiction 1880–1910

Routledge eBooks, Jun 4, 2020

From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development ... more From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development of industrial writing. Although prevented from gaining first-hand experience of the coalface, Welsh women writers were amongst the first to try to fictionalize those heavy industries-coal and metal in the south, and slate in the north-which dominated the lives of the majority of the late nineteenth-century Welsh population. Treatment of industrial matter is generally fragmentary in this early women's writing; industrial imagery and metaphor may be used in novels that are not primarily "about" industry at all. Yet from c. 1880-1910, Welsh women writers made a significant-and hitherto critically neglected-attempt to make sense in literature of contemporary industrial Wales in powerful and innovative ways. This essay maps their contribution and considers anglophone Welsh women writers' adaptations and innovations of form (particularly romance) as they try to find a way of representing industrial landscapes, communities and the daily realities of industrial labour. It identifies the genesis in women's writing of tropes that would become central to later industrial fiction, including depictions of industrial accident, injury, death and disability. And it explores the representation of social relations (class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) and conflict on this tumultuous, dangerous new stage. Women writers have been central to the development of the industrial novel, as with Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866). But the heavy industry that dominated in Wales-coal, iron, steel and quarrying-is notable for its absence in the early canonical novels by women (and men). 1 These industries were arguably less accessible to women writers with the necessary education and leisure to write than the factories which formed the basis of much of the early industrial fiction. There is a corresponding neglect in critical studies: in Susan Zlotnick's Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution, mining is mentioned just once, in passing relation to Felix Holt, and there is a similar dearth in relation to women writers in earlier studies by Martha Vicinus and Catherine

Select bibliography

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

List of abbreviations

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

List of abbreviations

Disability in industrial Britain, 2020

1, A miner is tested for nystagmus using ‘the head test’. From the First Report of the Miners’ Nystagmus Committee, 1922

Manchester University Press, 2020

Select bibliography

Disability in industrial Britain, Jan 7, 2020

A tolerant nation? : revisiting ethnic diversity in a devolved Wales

by Neil Evans and Kirsti Bohata

Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and... more Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and Charlotte Williams 1. Immigrants and Minorities in Wales, 1840 - 1990: A Comparative Perspective Neil Evans 2. Slaughter and Salvation: Welsh Missionary Activity and British Imperialism Jane Aaron 3. The Other Internationalism? Missionary Activity and Welsh Nonconformist Perceptions of the World in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Aled Jones 4. Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Literary Representations of the Racial and Gendered Other Kirsti Bohata 5. Wales and Africa : William Hughes and the Congo Institute Neil Evans and Ivor Wynne Jones 6. Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence: Riots and Racial Attacks in Wales, 1826 - 2014 Neil Evans 7. Playing the Game: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Modern Wales Neil Evans and Paul O'Leary 8. Changing the Archive: History and Memory as Cultural Politics in Multi-ethnic Wales Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon 9. Religious Diversity in Wales Paul ...

A tolerant nation? : revisiting ethnic diversity in a devolved Wales

Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and... more Introduction: Race, Nation and Globalization in a devolved Wales Neil Evans, Paul O'Leary and Charlotte Williams 1. Immigrants and Minorities in Wales, 1840 - 1990: A Comparative Perspective Neil Evans 2. Slaughter and Salvation: Welsh Missionary Activity and British Imperialism Jane Aaron 3. The Other Internationalism? Missionary Activity and Welsh Nonconformist Perceptions of the World in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Aled Jones 4. Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Literary Representations of the Racial and Gendered Other Kirsti Bohata 5. Wales and Africa : William Hughes and the Congo Institute Neil Evans and Ivor Wynne Jones 6. Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence: Riots and Racial Attacks in Wales, 1826 - 2014 Neil Evans 7. Playing the Game: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Modern Wales Neil Evans and Paul O'Leary 8. Changing the Archive: History and Memory as Cultural Politics in Multi-ethnic Wales Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon 9. Religious Diversity in Wales Paul ...

On Working with Williams: Five Female Perspectives

Digital Libraries of Scholarly Editions

Pioneers and Radicals: The Dillwyn Family's Transatlantic Tradition of Dissent and Innovation

Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2018

The Dillwyn family made a significant contribution to the commercial, industrial, and artistic de... more The Dillwyn family made a significant contribution to the commercial, industrial, and artistic development of the city of Swansea in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Their legacy remains not only in their published works but also in a number of street names and placenames in Swansea and its surrounding areas. This paper looks at the work of key members of the Dillwyn family, beginning with the American abolitionist, William Dillwyn, and his wider family. As practising Quakers, the Dillwyns were driven by a particular work ethic that was both industrious and unconventional. The paper focuses on the pioneering accomplishments of the Dillwyn women, including the author Amy Dillwyn.

DILLWYN, ELIZABETH AMY (1845 - 1935), novelist, industrialist and feminist campaigner

Special Issue: Disability, Work and Representation: New Perspectives

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2017

‘Unhomely Moments’: Reading and Writing Nation in Welsh Female Gothic

The Female Gothic, 2009

Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent s... more Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent signifiers from its inception to the present. Family, ‘race’ and nation are evoked by the sense of the word house meaning ‘lineage’, making houses emblematic of nation. Houses are also used figuratively in Female Gothic writing to encode and deconstruct the female body and psyche. If houses have traditionally symbolised imprisoning structures of patriarchy by which women are confined and from which they must escape, the house is a potentially troubling and problematic Gothic trope of nation for those reading or writing female nationhood. One of the aims of this essay will be to consider how ideas of nation(hood) and gender intersect and complicate each other in twentieth-century Anglophone Welsh Female Gothic. A second aim is to indicate some common organising features, in addition to houses, that might be associated with ‘the Welsh Female Gothic’; this essay will suggest ruined buildings, fire, disease and mental illness as prominent images which express gender and cultural crisis.