Dr Martin Padget

Senior Lecturer
BA (Sussex), PhD (California) Photograph of Dr Martin Padget.

Contact

Email: mtp@aber.ac.uk
Office: E14
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621948

Teaching Areas

Martin’s teaching interests largely lie in the broad area of nineteenth and twentieth century American literary and cultural history. At the undergraduate level, he teaches core modules in American Studies and a range of option modules on American literature and film. He also contributes teaching to core modules in nineteenth and twentieth century British literature. At the Masters level, he teaches modules on Ethnic American Literature and Twentieth Century American Literature. He also regularly supervises Masters dissertations and doctoral theses.

Research

Martin has a range of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research interests in American and British subject matter. His book Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) examines the works of Anglo writers and artists who encountered Native Americans in the course of their travels in the Southwest beginning from the decade of the US-Mexico War. The book addresses two topics: how the Southwest emerged as a distinctive region of the United States in the minds of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans, and what impact these conceptions, and the growing presence of Anglos, had on Indians in the region. Martin is following up this interest in American Indian subject matter by writing The Cambridge Introduction to Native American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which is designed to provide an incisive interpretation of the full range of native literary expression, including chapters on the oral tradition, nineteenth-century life histories, poetry, contemporary fiction, and native film and drama. He is also the co-author (with Maria Lauret, Candida Hepworth and Helena Grice) of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on American literature, history and photography.

The first article that Martin published, in the journal College Literature, examined photographic imagery of the Highlands and islands of Scotland in the late nineteenth century. He has returned to this research interest in his book Photographers of the Western Isles (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010), which examines why and how photographers were draw to these fascinating islands from the mid nineteenth century onward. The book features the work of photographers such as Captain F.W.L. Thomas of the Admiralty Survey, who created the first images of St Kilda in 1860, George Washington Wilson, whose topographical images of the Highlands and Islands formed an integral part of a photographic business that developed a worldwide reach during the nineteenth century, and Paul Strand who visited South Uist in 1954 to create a series of powerful portraits and landscape views for his book Tir a’ Mhurain.

Biography

He earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies at the University of Sussex and his MA and PhD in English and American literature at the University of California, San Diego. 

He spent the 2000-2001 academic year as Clements Fellow in Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in the United States and has held shorter term fellowships at the Huntington Library, Beinecke Library, Newberry Library and Center for Creative Photography.

Academic Prizes

Arthur Miller Centre Prize, awarded in 2010 by the British Association for American Studies to the best article of 2009 on an American subject, for ‘Native Americans, the Photobook and the Southwest: Ansel Adams’s and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo’, which appears in Mick Gidley, ed., Writing with Light: Words and Photographs in American Texts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009)

Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935 named runner-up for the Southwest Books of the Year Competition for 2004—250 books entered for competition

Bolton-Kinnaird Prize, awarded in 1996 by the Western History Association to the best article of 1995 on Spanish Borderlands history, for ‘Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Region: Charles Fletcher Lummis and the “Creation” of the Southwest," Journal of the Southwest 37, no. 3 (1995): 421-49

Externally Funded Fellowships (selected) 

  • 2007 (one month), Autry National Center, Los Angeles, USA
  • 2005 (four months), Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leave Award
  • 2002 (one month), Ansel Adams Fellowship, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
  • 2000-2001 (nine months), Clements Fellow in Southwest Studies, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA
  • 1996 (two months), British Academy/ Newberry Library Exchange Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, USA
  • 1996 (one month), Frederick Hanna Fellowship in American History, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, USA
  • 1995 (two months), Wilbur Jacobs and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, USA
  • 1993 (three months), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, USA

 

Staff Links

American Studies Links
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads

Clements for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
http://www.smu.edu/swcenter/

Huntington Library
http://www.huntington.org/LibraryDiv/LibraryHome.html

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/

Newberry Library
http://www.newberry.org/nl/newberryhome.html

Center for Creative Photography
http://www.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/ccphome.html

Western Literature Association
http://www.usu.edu/westlit/

Western History Association
http://www.unm.edu/~wha/

Index of Native American Resources on the Internet
http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/

Resources for Indigenous Cultures around the World
http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/

Native American Sites
http://www.nativeculture.com/lisamitten/indians.html

Journal of the Southwest Online
http://www.library.arizona.edu/library/type1/publications/data/Journal-of-the-SW.html

Additional Interests

Martin is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of the Southwest, which is based at the University of Arizona in the United States. He has also served on the Executive Committee of the British Association for American Studies.

Staff Publications

Books

Photographers of the Western Isles (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010)

Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) (paperback edition, February 2006) http://www.unmpress.com/Book.php?id=10135490564904

(Eighteen reviews in American Historical Review, American Literary History, American Literature, CHOICE, European Journal of American Culture, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of American History, Journal of Arizona History, Journal of San Diego History, Montana, New Mexico Historical Review, Pacific Historical Review, Southwestern American Literature, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Studies in Travel Writing, Western American Literature, Western Historical Quarterly, and Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, co-authored with Maria Lauret, Helena Grice and Candida Hepworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)

(Reviewed in Journal of American Studies and MELUS )

Articles & Book Chapters

‘Native Americans, the Photobook and the Southwest: Ansel Adams’ and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo’, in Writing with Light: Essays on American Photography, ed. Mick Gidley (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 19-42.   http://www.peterlang.net/Index.cfm?vID=11572&vHR=1&vUR=1&vUUR=38&vLang=F

‘The Southwest and Travel Writing’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixter and Judith Hamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 78-100.   http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521861098

‘Poverty, Piety and Newsprint’, New Welsh Review 77 (Autumn 2007): 8-16.

‘Women in the West’, Making of the American West: People and Perspectives, ed. Benjamin Johnson (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2007), 239-58

‘Travels in the American Southwest’, Journal of the Southwest 46, no. 2 (2004): 414-40

‘Mourning and Reconciliation’, Leviathan Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2001): 55-68

‘Desert Wanderings’, European Journal of American Culture 19, no. 3 (2000): 167-83

‘Travel Writing, Sentimental Romance, and Indian Rights Advocacy: The Politics of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona’, Journal of the Southwest 42, no. 4 (2000): 833-76

‘Claiming, Corrupting, Contesting: Reconsidering “The West” in Western American Literature’, American Literary History 10, no. 2 (1998): 378-92

‘Film, Ethnography and the Scene of History: Dances With Wolves and Participant Observation’, Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 3, no. 4 (1996): 396-412

‘Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Region: Charles Fletcher Lummis and the “Creation” of the Southwest’, Journal of the Southwest 37, no. 3 (1995): 421-49.   http://digital.library.arizona.edu/jsw/3703/padget.html

‘An Iconography of Difference: Internal Colonialism, Photography, and the Crofters of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’, College Literature 20, no. 2 (1993): 177-95