Susan Mandala in Style

Dr Susan Mandala has published an article in the summer 2012 edition of the journal Style about the work of the North East crime-writer Sheila Quigley. In 'Crime Fiction as Regional Fiction: An Analysis of Dialect and Point of View in Sheila Quigley’s Bad Moon Rising', Susan argues that although the book is ostensibly a crime novel, it makes its most significant contribution as a regional novel by using point of view operations and dialect representation to confront a number of worryingly vicious stereotypes currently circulating about the urban poor. Offering a rare positive view of urban poverty in contemporary British popular culture as it does so, Bad Moon Rising also takes the canon of English Northeastern regional writing in a welcome new direction.

New archaeological findings in Ireland

Geophysics fieldwork in Ireland by a team of students and tutors from the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning has yielded a spectacular finding in the form of the ground plan (hitherto unknown) of the early Christian monastery of Carrowmore in County Donegal. This is the headline result from work which also included some wider appraisal of landscape features and it is one which Colm O'Brien (NECLL) will take to an international conference on Early Christian Landscapes in University College Cork later this month. A journal article is also in the pipeline. You can read how the news was reported in the Irish Independent here. The work was carried out with a gradiometer purchased through a capital funding grant from the university.

New season of History Lab seminars announced

Detail from a portrait of King Charles II
after Adriaen Hanneman (NPG)   

The History Lab has announced its new season of seminars. All talks start at 5pm, last for 30-40 minutes and are followed by a trip to the pub and a meal to which all are invited. The location is Priestman Building, Room 013. Everyone is welcome!

4th October  Dr Alasdair Raffe (Northumbria University) 'Charles II, James VII and the problems of the Scottish Church'

8th November  Dr Neil Ewins (University of
Sunderland) 'Globalization and the case of the UK ceramic industry'

6th December  Dr Gavin Schaffer (University of Birmingham) 'Making multiculturalism on British TV: Postwar British broadcasting and race'

Geoff Nash on the BBC

In July Dr Geoff Nash (English) appeared on the BBC One programme Great British Islam. The documentary explores the lives and legacies of three English nineteenth-century Muslim converts: William Quilliam, Baron Headley and Marmaduke Pickthall. You can view it here.