Mobility Humanities

Lynne Pearce is a scholar who has been involved in bringing humanities approaches to bear upon mobility practices since around the time Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) was established by John Urry and Mimi Sheller twenty years ago. Whilst literary scholars, in particular, have been slow to respond to the invitation to engage in challenging interdisciplinary scholarship, she has been actively involved in the Centre since 2014, and is now serving as its co-director (Humanities). In recent times, Pearce has published two landmark books focusing on literary and cultural mobilities—Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (2016) and Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (2019)—and is also co-editor of the collection Mobilities, Literature, Culture (2019) (with Marian Aguiar and Charlotte Mathieson). In addition, she has been guest editor of several pioneering special issues—for example, “The Urban Imaginary” for Mobilities (February, 2012), “Mobility and the Humanities” for Mobilities (April, 2017) (with Peter Merriman), “Mobilities and Memory” for Mobility Humanities (July, 2022), and the double special issue, “Unruly Landscapes,” for Transfers (March and July, 2022) with Margherita Cisani, Laura Lo Presti, Giada Peterle, and Chiara Rabbiosi from the University of Padua.