Mother of Dragons (author bio)

Site/Dragon master Miranda Butler is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Riverside.

I research nineteenth-century scientific discourse, especially in evolutionary biology and comparative anatomy, as it relates to Victorian visual cultures, media technologies, and nineteenth-century fiction. As Darwinian questions of biological inheritance have evolved into present-day studies of DNA and genomics, I also trace these Victorian threads into twenty-first century spheres, both scientific and science fictional.

My recent work combines my interests in nineteenth-century media and STS with my academic background in linguistics to investigate Victorian shorthand, phonotypy, and coding, as these practices express the relationship between media technologies, sensory perception, and the transmission of information.

In the context of the 144Dragons project, which was created for a graduate course in Medieval manuscripts and paleography, I have found it incredibly fruitful to study the relationship between physical forms of media and embodiment, and how this relationship plays out both medically and epistemologically. Reading is a metaphor for life because in the early days of reading, and medieval wrytyng, as Daniel Wakelin points out, words were written onto the bodies of animals, and readers experienced them with their whole bodies in turn, tangibly and audibly.

In my soon-to-be-proposed special research topic, I am studying the widespread popularity of telegraphic Morse code and Pitman’s phonographic shorthand. Building on the work of Gillian Beer, who has argued that Charles Darwin developed his theories by “reading” nature as the Book of Life, my project analyzes the metaphors of reading, translating, interpreting, and “decoding,” that medical professionals use to understand life and inheritance, from both the nineteenth-century biological/evolutionary and twenty-first century chemical/molecular points of view.

Contact info: I can be reached at miranda.butler@email.ucr.edu.