New Spanish translation of the Old English elegies

Miguel Gomes's new translation of the Old English elegies has just been published. The poems, written down by an unknown scribe in the 10th century, present a world of lords, warriors, and icy Northern waters ringing with the cries of seabirds. These elegies are major works of world literature which challenge the Renaissance myth that the period following the fall of Rome was a cultural void. Miguel's translation is accompanied by an extensive study of the poems, which places them at the crossroads of the Germanic heroic world and the millenarian anxieties of medieval Christianity.

Keynote address in Sweden

Professor Angela Smith

Professor Angela Smith will be giving a keynote address at the annual conference of the Swedish association of Media and Communication Studies (FSMK) at Örebro University (16th-17th May 2019). The conference topic is "The critical challenge" and Angela's keynote will focus on the challenges and rewards of teaching media theory to non-media students.

Theatre censorship in Spain

Dr Michael Thompson

The Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute is holding its next School of Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 1st May 4-5pm at St. Peter’s Campus in David Goldman Room 312A.

All staff and students are welcome as Dr Michael Thompson from Durham University presents his research on theatre censorship in Spain. Work on censorship in modern Spain (both his own and that of other scholars) focuses primarily on the period of the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). This is a rich field and in some ways a very accessible one: Franco’s censorship apparatus was methodical and centralized, and almost all the information needed for an in-depth investigation is contained in the Spanish state archive in Alcalá de Henares. The administrative documents and thousands of censors’ reports provide concrete evidence of what was censored, by whom, and according to what criteria. However, Dr Michael Thompson’s research has sought to compare this model of censorship with those in operation before the establishment of the dictatorship. Theatre censorship during the Second Republic (1931-36) was decentralized and much less reliant on prior vetting of texts, and became radically fragmented by the social, political and economic upheaval triggered in the Republican zone by the civil war (1936-39). Evidence of the operation of censorship in these periods is therefore scarcer, and particularly elusive with reference to the confused war years. Dr Michael Thompson’s talk will present examples of the different kinds of evidence available from the three periods and reflect on what they show about different models of cultural control.