The semiotics of British butter in the context of Brexit

Professor Angela Smith has recently given a paper at the 6th FoodKom seminar in Stockholm. She considered the semiotics of butter packaging in the British context, to explore how national identity is represented. Angela argued that since 2016 national identity has become a central theme in the packing of British butter, whether this is a supermarket own brand, or a leading dairy producer.  The absence of cows in this packaging is part of a long-running semiotic practice that seems to relate to the industrialisation of the dairy industry in Britain, but the raising of national symbols seems triggered by the threat to the UK dairy industry that Brexit embodies.  Through the exploration of the changes made to one specific brand, Anchor, Angela showed how both of these strands have lead to the redesigned packaging we find now.

Borges and Old English revisited: The translation of The OE dialogues of Solomon and Saturn

In 1966 the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with María Esther Vázquez, published Literaturas germánicas medievales, a study of the origins of Anglo-Saxon, German and Scandinavian literature. Borges included a number of translations, sometimes single sentences, often fragments, of a range of Old English poems alongside a brief discussion of those texts. These works will be the focus of a talk by Dr Miguel Gomes, in a Humanities Research Seminar taking place on Wednesday 27th November at 4pm in RV404.

Miguel will explore Borges’ interest and understanding of the rather unusual Anglo-Saxon texts featuring King Solomon and the pagan Saturn, as well as his translation of certain passages taken from two of the four existing Old English dialogues. Borges’ engagement with these texts, starting with the publication of “Un diálogo anglosajón del siglo XI” in 1961 (La Biblioteca, Revista de la biblioteca nacional, 2° epoca, Tomo IX, N°5) will be discussed alongside the little attention that the dialogues have received from the Spanish speaking academic world.

Jorge Luis Borges in 1984

Sunderland academics contribute to the Being Human festival 2019

Once again, historians at Sunderland are contributing to the nationwide Being Human festival. Click on the links below to find out more:

Sunderland's unsung heroes (Sarah Hellawell)
Coffee and sedition (Delphine Doucet)

As part of the festival, Sunderland is also hosting a talk by the historian Michael Wood on how Wearmouth saved the West.

The photographic historian Caroline McKay will also be presenting A New Vision of the World.

Borges and beyond

Dr Miguel Gomes has recently given a paper at the 31st International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM). Entitled 'Borges and Beyond: Reception and Translation of The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn in the Spanish Speaking World', Miguel's paper explored Borges’ interest and understanding of these rather unusual Anglo-Saxon texts featuring King Solomon and the pagan Saturn. Miguel explored Borges’ engagement with these texts from a perspective taking into account both recent scholarship and a number of translations of the Dialogues into other modern languages.

Dr Marion Phillips' Blue Plaque

Research by Dr Sarah Hellawell into female political activism in the North East has led to her discovering more about Sunderland's first female member of parliament, Dr Marion Phillips.  A blue plaque to mark Marion's role and the former location of the Labour party's committee rooms in Sunderland was unveiled on Friday 13th September.  The event was attended by Houghton and Sunderland South MP, Bridget Phillipson, Sunderland's mayor, Mr David Snowdon and mayoress, Mrs Dianne Snowdon, and about 50 others from the local community and representatives of the university.  This group also included young activists, NEFlow and students from St Wilfrid's RC College who help run the Canny Clean project.

Angela Smith on British widows of the First World War

Angela Smith recently presented a talk based on her research relating to British widows of the First World War to the University of the Third Age (U3A), Newcastle.  This research is also being drawn on by the producers of the social history television programme, A House Through Time. Angela has been helping to explain more of the lives and social context of some of the residents of an old house in Bristol for the third series of the show, which is due to be broadcast in spring 2020.

Political offensiveness

In a chapter co-authored with Martin Montgomery (University of Macau) and Michael Higgins (Strathclyde University) entitled 'Political offensiveness in the mediated public sphere: the performative play of alignments', Professor Angela Smith explores developing concerns about the rise of offensiveness in the political public sphere and more especially in social media. The authors argue that current iterations of purposeful political offence should be considered in the context of a number of factors.  One is the ascendency of short-form social media such as Twitter and Instagram, which disperse and fragment the discourse of political elites, enabling multi-articulated tactics of address that are subject to processes of remediation.  A second factor is the rise of “post-truth” politics (Montgomery, 2017), in which impressions of personal authenticity take the place of facts, and truth becomes less important than ‘speaking your mind’. The chapter shows that several significant cases of political offence take form and shape along an axis between ’authentic' expression (or ‘speaking your mind’) and submission to political correctness.

'Political offensiveness in the mediated public sphere: the performative play of alignments' can be found in Anne Graefer (ed) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave, 2019.

Visiting Professor Karen Boyle

Humanities at Sunderland are delighted to announce that Professor Karen Boyle (Strathclyde University) has been appointed as visiting professor of English. She gave her inaugural paper on the history and development of the MeToo movement at the 'Gendered Worlds' event last month. Professor Boyle's appointment lasts for three years and will involve occasional visits to Sunderland to give research papers and to teach.

The Second Annual History Postgraduate Symposium

The Second Annual History Postgraduate Symposium will be hosted by our MA and PhD students. It will range widely in period and topic. Among the subjects covered will be comedy and political satire, oral history and oral traditions, sports history, working-class women's history, the history of crime and law enforcement, media and public information during the interwar years, the civilian experience in occupied countries during the Second World War.

All are welcome and food and drink is provided. The event is free, but please register here.

Date and time: Saturday 29th June 2019; 09:00 – 17:00.

Location: Fans Museum, Northern Gateway, Sunderland SR5 1AP.

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MA student awarded prestigious research bursary

One of our MA in Historical Research students, Brogan Fannen, recently received an MA Dissertation Bursary from the Society for the Study of Labour History to facilitate archival research in Manchester.

Brogan's dissertation explores the role of the Socialist Sunday Schools (SSS) within the history of the British socialist movement, with a primary focus on the Schools’ role in facilitating and cultivating a socialist culture among British working-class communities in the twentieth century. 

The bursary allowed Brogan to carry out a research trip to the Labour History Archive (LHA) located at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. She examined the promotional literature of the movement such as pamphlets and postcards, as well as reports and minutes. She also analysed the yearly annuals of The Young Socialist Magazine, a publication which gave insight into the plethora of teaching methods used within the SSSs, the propaganda disseminated by the movement and reports on the Schools’ activities within the community.

You can read more about Brogan's work here.

A BA, MA or PhD student interested in labour history and in need of research support? Apply for an SSLH research bursary here!

Contesting Islamophobia

Dr Geoff Nash has published a chapter co-authored with Dr Nath Aldalala’a (University of Shandong, China) entitled 'Islamophobia and the War of Representations: Martin Amis's 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'', in Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics (Bloomsbury 2019).

The collection reveals the way in which Islamophobia's pervasive power is being met with responses that challenge it and the worldview on which it rests. The volume breaks new ground by outlining the characteristics of contemporary Islamophobia across a range of political, historic, and cultural public debates in Europe and the United States. Its editors are Professor Peter Morey, University of Birmingham, Dr Amina Yaqin and Dr Alaya Forte, both of the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London.

Dr Geoff Nash has recently become a Research Associate at SOAS (University of London).  

Storytelling with graphic novels

In the final School of Culture Research Seminar, Costa award-winners Bryan Talbot and Mary Talbot will talk about the books they've done together and what the graphic novel form brings to their storytelling. Focusing on their collaborative work to date, they demonstrate the power of the graphic novel to communicate complex material in an accessible way. Emotionally charged biographical details, tangled historical events or the contemporary challenges of climate change – whatever the subject, the graphic novel’s unique combination of word and image can render it compelling.

Wednesday June 19th at 4 pm in David Goldman 313. All welcome!

The cover of Rain, the next graphic novel by Bryan and Mary Talbot, out in October 2019

Naked dating shows

Professor Angela Smith has published an article about the Channel 4 show Naked Attraction. This programme involves clothed participants viewing and commenting on six potential 'dates' as they stand naked in plastic pods designed to gradually reveal their bodies from the feet upwards. Angela explores how the shock of graphic nudity is ameliorated by the linguistic strategies of positive politeness with which all participants seem to collude and engage. Such amelioration, she argues, would appear to be a defence against accusations of voyeuristic and pornographic content on mainstream TV.

Smith, A. 2019. ‘How the hell did this get on tv?’: Naked dating shows as the final taboo on mainstream TV. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 

Rare Birds by Natalie Scott

Rare Birds, by the poet Natalie Scott, who was awarded a PhD in English from Sunderland in 2015, is a collection of dramatic monologues which creatively re-imagines the story of Holloway Prison’s first one hundred years through the voices of prisoners, staff and others connected to its history, to explore some of the injustices of the penal system during this period. 

The poems voice women in roles other than that of criminal: there are social campaigners, comrades, as well as sisters, daughters, mothers, wives, lovers and companions. Although it has a historical context, the collection explores many of the themes which are still relevant today: human rights, equality, gender, identity, mental illness, social class.

Natalie received Arts Council funding to bring her work to the stage, and in May 2019 an ensemble of West End actors performed her piece in a workshop production at The Soho Theatre, supported by original music and songs from award-winning British musical theatre composers, and devised and directed by Simon Greiff.

You can find out more about Natalie's work at her website.

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.

Angela Smith on the BBC

Following the recent paperback publication of her book, Belligerent Broadcasting, Angela Smith has appeared on BBC Radio Newcastle to talk about the spread of conflict talk across the media. As Angela’s book has explored, conflict talk is now so widespread it is generally not noticed.  However, as Angela points out, this is something that media regulators are now taking notice of.  She is working with Ofcom to explore public perceptions of such conflict talk in the media, and is currently running  focus groups in Sunderland and Glasgow. 

Murder, mystery and my family

PhD student Patrick Low will be appearing in an episode of BBC 1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family on Thursday 4th April 2019 at 9.15 am. 

Patrick researches nineteenth-century executions in North East England, and his expertise was drawn on in this episode which features the execution of Michael Gilligan, hanged alongside William McHugh and Elizabeth Pearson at Durham Prison in 1875. Patrick meets the family, talks about the execution and gives details about the prisoners' final moments. 

Translating the Old English elegies into Spanish

Dr Miguel Gomes has recently returned from Traductio et  Traditio Mediaevales - a conference in Spain dedicated to written culture as a tool for knowledge transmission. Miguel gave a paper which examined the spatial and cultural shifts involved in the translation of Old English literature into a language other than modern English, focusing on his own recent translation of the Old English elegies into Spanish verse, whilst discussing some of the difficulties encountered when rendering the ‘original’ texts into this target language for a contemporary readership.

The petticoat fallacy: male historians and female agency in women's narrative histories

The Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute is holding the next School of Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 20^th March 4-5:30 pm at St. Peter’s Campus in Reg Vardy Building, Room 112.

Archaeologist and historian Max Adams will be discussing his research exploring how women have used alternative strategies to develop agency in artistic, social and political life and exploited opportunities created by widowhood and through patronage to gain access to resources and power.

Tickets are free for this event.

For full details of the event and to register for the seminar please click here.

Culture research seminar

Dr Rachel Ramsey

The university's new research impact officer, Dr Rachel Ramsey, will feature in the School of Culture's upcoming research seminar. She will be presenting the key findings from her doctoral research, which aimed to make methodological and theoretical contributions to the knowledge and study of the senses of polysemous words. Rachel offers her analysis of four polysemous words – over, under, above and below – as a case study for the use of sentence-sorting tasks, data from which were analysed statistically and graphically to test two predictions of an exemplar-theoretic account of word sense representation. More details can be found here.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019: 16:00 - 17:30

St. Peter's Campus, Reg Vardy Room 306

Ex-MA student to edit peer reviewed academic journal about zombies

Revenant is a peer-reviewed e-journal dedicated to academic and creative explorations of the supernatural, the uncanny and the weird. The guest editor of an upcoming edition about the cultural evolution of the zombie is 2017-18 MA English student Anthony Anderson. You can view the Call for Papers here.

Latest edition of the Journal of Intercultural Inquiry out now

The new edition of the Journal of Intercultural Inquiry edited by Drs Geoff Nash and Michael Pearce is out now. Its diverse articles (by authors based in China, Scotland, Germany and Canada) cover Chinese conceptions of world history, Kazuo Ishiguro, and the experiences of Muslim overseas students in the UK. Enjoy it here.