Ian Ground gives keynote address

Dr Ian Ground (NECLL) pictured giving his keynote address at the Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture and the Environment conference at Newcastle University on 12th July

Alison O'Malley-Younger on commodity spectacle

Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger's chapter entitled ''A Parliament of Monsters': Commodity Spectacle in Nineteenth-century Irish Popular Entertainment' appears in Ireland in Drama, Film and Popular Culture (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012) edited by Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak and Margarete Rubik.

Dr Lauren Clark

Lauren Clark (MA Glasgow) has been awarded a PhD from the Department of Culture. Her thesis, entitled  "Modest Proposals: Irish Children, Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature, 1860-1921" is a study of the role of the Victorian Irish child in an emergent Irish consumer and advertising culture. Informed by Irish and French Literature and Irish social history, the thesis, which was supervised by Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger (Sunderland) and Professor John Strachan (Northumbria) was one of the key outputs of a three year Leverhulme funded research project "Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature in Ireland 1848-1921." 

Proton gradiometer for NECLL

Colm O’Brien (NECLL) has been awarded a capital funding grant from the university to purchase a proton gradiometer for archaeological geophysics. This is to enable fieldwork by the Bernician Studies Group within the Explore programme at NECLL (North East Centre for Lifelong Learning).  Colm O’Brien and Max Adams of NECLL will be taking a team of students to County Donegal in the Irish Republic in the second half of August to survey two early medieval monastery sites.

Sarah Hackett in Amsterdam

Dr Sarah Hackett (History and Politics) will be giving a paper at the International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion Conference (IMISCOE) in Amsterdam on the 28th-29th August 2012. Her paper is part of the 'Family Migration Policy and Integration' panel and is entitled 'The Integration of Former Guest-worker Communities in Bremen: The Importance of Family and Education'. Sarah's paper reflects her current research interests in immigration, demography and regional identity, as does her most recent article - a comparative analysis of immigration in Bremen and Newcastle - which appeared in the May 2012 issue of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte.

Language in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Susan Mandala

Dr Susan Mandala's latest monograph Language in Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Question of Style (Continuum 2012) is now out in paperback.

"The language of science fiction, and of fantasy, has a steep challenge: that of the creation of other worlds, societies and characters that are alien to us in diverse and fundamental ways, but still compelling and knowable.  This exciting book steps away from the issues of race, gender and politics that have saturated sci-fi and fantasy criticism.  Rather, it challenges two widely held but poorly substantiated beliefs circulating about science fiction and fantasy - that they are a) written in plain and unremarkable prose and b) apt to present characters that are flat types rather than fully realised individuals.

Mandala draws on traditional syntactic categories of stylistic analysis as well as the relatively more recent pragmatic and sociolinguistic paradigms such that the original analyses here take our understanding of these two genres beyond the usual confines, to consider how language is used to draw alternative words, represent the far future and distant past, and create psychologically believable characters.

Covering both British and American fiction and television, this is a wide-ranging and perceptive book." (From the publisher's website.)

Spectral Visions reviewed

A still from Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) 

You can read a review of the conference by Amy McLean (BA English and Drama) here. And this is how the Sunderland Echo reported it.

Angela Smith on Crimewatch

Dr Angela Smith (English) has been invited to give a paper at the 20th Anniversary Seminar of the Ross Priory Broadcast Talk Group (Strathclyde University) 9th-12th July. Her paper is an analysis of the popular BBC programme Crimewatch. Angela looks at how the programme has changed in its presentation since the production moved to Cardiff in 2009, arguing that it is now more akin to a TV detective drama, ameliorated by a hyper-verisimilitude in the studio sequences.