Rebecca Stott
The Boundary Crosser
CreativeUEA
Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at The School of Literature, Drama & Creative Writing
Professor Rebecca Stott is an academic, novelist, radio broadcaster and award-winning non-fiction writer.
Her work spans several disciplines, including history, archaeology, literature and the history of science. Here at UEA, Prof Stott teaches literature and creative writing modules. She also supervises PhD students writing historical novels and literary memoirs.
At the University of York, Prof Stott studied English & History of Art, an MA in Anglo-American late nineteenth-century literature and a PhD that examined literature, history and science. She then taught literature at different universities before joining UEA in 2007 as Professor of Literature and Creative Writing after publishing the best-selling historical thriller Ghostwalk. In 2017, Prof Stott won the Costa Prize for Biography for her memoir In the Days of Rain. In 2021, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
"Stott is masterly, as both a storyteller and a historian." - Times Literary Supplement
My Story
‘I was raised in a highly religious, creationist household during the 1960s. All non-religious books were banned, except for the family encyclopaedia where several pages, including all the entries on Darwin and Darwinism for instance, had been censored. Rules governed every aspect of our lives. I spent long hours roaming the family encyclopaedia and the school library where I found I could follow my own curiosity. Not surprisingly, as an adult I became both highly sceptical of ‘orthodox truth’ and a strong feminist.
I have spent much of my research career writing books that crossed conventional disciplinary and genre boundaries. I published books, for instance, on Charles Darwin, the history of evolution, the invention of the aquarium, the cultural history of oysters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson. When I came to feel that the ‘rules’ of conventional academic enquiry did not allow me to roam as widely as I wanted, I began to experiment with fiction and ‘creative non-fiction’ as a way of better exploring complex intellectual and philosophical questions. My first novel Ghostwalk, for instance, a historical thriller, explored seventeenth-century plague, optics, and ideas drawn from quantum theory.’
Key Projects
Prof Stott’s first book written for a general audience followed Darwin through eight intense years as he obsessed about the riddle of the barnacle. She was lucky enough to be invited to ‘workshop’ the book chapter by chapter with a group of experts at the University of Cambridge, comprising philosophers, biologists, historians and science historians. Together they found ways to translate their expert language and disciplinary norms to tackle challenging questions.
Ten years in the making, this book traces the long history of evolution as an idea, from Aristotle in 350BC to 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. To cover 2,200 years of intellectual history and understand Darwin’s predecessors as thinkers, Prof Stott undertook years of research in libraries and archives while seeking out and interviewing experts in history, theology, classics and history of science.
While writing Darwin’s Ghosts, Prof Stott found women – wives, sisters, friends - working behind most of the male scientists she studied, always in the shadows. Some of them ran laboratories or undertook experiments or edited or illustrated manuscripts but they were also excluded from the clubs and networks that led to publication. As a way to understand this exclusion, Prof Stott wrote this novel about an eighteenth-century coral collector, a woman in search of the key to evolution while caught up in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
This memoir tells the story of Prof Stott’s family’s involvement in a cult called The Exclusive Brethren over a period of a hundred years. Prof Stott was the fourth generation of her family to be born into the group. She understood that family history required her to closely study the social psychology of totalitarianism, and the processes by which coercive control works within groups and families. Prof Stott also examined the history of revivalism in the Scottish fishing communities where her family has its roots. Her process combined intensive research in libraries with interviews with ‘witnesses’ and experts in the fields of literature, history of religion, social psychology and cultic studies.
Thinking Without Borders
‘Disciplines were ‘invented’ by universities. Before that intellectual enquiry was all ‘interdisciplinary’. The study of literature and the writing of novels are both, at least for me, profoundly interdisciplinary and intellectually-liberating creative processes. Radical curiosity and enquiry require generous cross-pollination via collaboration.’
Books
- Darwin and the Barnacle
- Oyster – a cultural history of the oyster seen ‘through’ philosophy, natural history, art history, social history, food history and more.
- Ghostwalk – a novel, shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ First Novel Award.
- The Coral Thief - a novel and BBC Radio Four’s Book at Bedtime 2010.
- Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists
- In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult - winner of the Costa Biography Award 2017.
- Dark Earth – a novel set in derelict Londinium 500AD.
- ‘Dust, Like Pollen’ in Body of Work: Forty Years of Writing at UEA - an essay about how Prof Stott writes about history and interdisciplinarity.
