Projects
- Group for Renaissance Research Reading (Academic)
- CW and SLA - Creative writing as a tool in second language acquisition (FP7 MC IRSES) (Principal investigator)
- Helping young readers with comprehension problems (Principal investigator)
My first two books addressed questions about the period 1650-1750:
- why did prose style get 'readable' for present day readers when it hadn't been in the past?
- when and why did people start to treat printed texts differently from speech by the same authors?
More recent work addresses problems of mental imagery in response to verbal description. I'd like to incorporate these findings into my next book, on literature and well-being.
I am a member of the Literary Linguistics Advanced Reading Group and the Renaissance Research Reading Group.
Current/future projects
- Article on the eighteenth-century hymn as a form of lyric which crossed social boundaries
- Article on mental imagery and representations of sex in novels.
- Review of work in different fields on literature and well-being.
Completed/near completion
- Impertinent writers and imagined readers: speech, print and decorum, 1600-1750 (monograph)
- 'Obnoxious preoccupation with sex organs': Nabokov and the ethics and aesthetics of representing sex
- AHRC Knowledge Transfer grant to work with teachers on reading comprehension (2007-2008)
- EU Marie Curie staff exchange grant to investigate creative writing as a tool in second language acquisition (2009-2012)
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2011, 'What should teachers understand about the history of reading?' in Sue Ellis and Elspeth McArtney, eds. Applied Linguistics and the Primary School, Cambridge University Press.
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2010, '"The very defective and erroneous method": reading instruction and social identity in elite eighteenth-century learners', Oxford Review of Education, 36, 2, pp.141-156
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2010, 'Unknown unknowns; ignorance of the Indies among late seventeenth-century Scots', The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, Intersections, Brill, Leiden. 393-413. Argues that decorum inhibited the free movement of knowledge and may have contributed to the Darien disaster. Read an earlier draft of this article
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, Chris Butler, Steve Kelly, Allan McNeill, and Katie Overy, 2010, 'Crying, moving and keeping it whole: what makes literary description of faces vivid', Poetics Today, 31 (3).
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, Sue Ellis, 2009, Comprehension and the silent reader , guide for teachers generated by AHRC Knowledge Transfer Project.
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2007, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, University of Toronto Press.
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2007, The Historical Journal, 'Pepys in the history of reading', 50, 3, pp.1-21.
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2004, 'Income, ideology and childhood reading in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries', History of Education, 33, 1, pp.55 - 73.
- Jajdelska, Elspeth, 2004, 'The Scots in Poland: a study of assimilation', in Peter Leese, ed. Between Two Cultures: Poland and Britain, British Council, Poznan. pp.25-37.
- Findlay, Elspeth, 2002, 'Ralph Thoresby the diarist: the late seventeenth-century pious diary and its demise', Seventeenth Century, 17, 1, pp.108 - 130.
