Re-reading Spare Rib

Professor Angela Smith has edited a collection of essays about Spare Rib, one of the most iconic symbols of Second Wave Feminism, whose influence has far out-lived the span of its publication (1972-1993).  Re-Reading Spare Rib (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) examines various aspects of the magazine - based on the digitised publication by the British Library in 2015 - in order to explore the ways in which it has influenced society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the lives of individual readers. By analysing several articles from a modern, post-feminist perspective, and using cross-generational interviews of Spare Rib readers and reflective accounts of reading the publication, the significance and endurance of the publication is demonstrated. Written by academics, experienced researchers and independent scholars alike, the inter-disciplinary nature of the text results in a multi-dimensional reading of Spare Rib suitable for both an academic and general readership interested in cultural and media studies.

In addition to Angela, two other members of the School of Culture have contributed chapters: Dr Kath Kerr-Koch, and PhD student Maria Fotiadou. Other Sunderland contributions come from Professor Catherine Donovan, Professor Donna Chambers, Professor Bridget Cooper, Dr Sheila Quaid,  Dr Rob Worrall, Dr Paul-Alan Armstrong, Trish Bryans, and Helen Fraser.

First World War conference

Helmuth von Moltke

Several members of the Department of Culture will be taking part in an academic conference to be held at the university on the 5th and 6th April 2014. The First World War and Its Global Legacies: 100 Years On will explore the impact of this first truly global war on the history, culture, philosophy, language and politics of the century following it. The conference programme includes over twenty papers by scholars from as far afield as Russia, Algeria and the USA. Topics include landscapes and the imagination; computer games; colonial education in British West Africa; media representations of veterans of the Great War. Amongst the keynote speakers will be Professor Maggie Andrews, Professor Tim Kirk, Dr Martin Hurcombe and Kate Adie (writer and broadcaster). Sunderland's Dr Angela Smith will be giving a keynote talk entitled ‘Sympathy and Suspicion: State Surveillance of British Widows of the First World War’. Six other Department of Culture members will also be giving papers.

• Arwa Ebrahim: 'The Impact of the First World War on the Middle East and its Effect on Arab Women'.
• Dr Barry Lewis: 'Rechewing the Cud: Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way and the Irish Experience of the First World War'.
• Dr Kath Kerr-Koch: 'From Apokatastasis to Deconstruction: The Legacy of the First World War in the Transfiguration of Modern Thought'.
• Janet Pearson: 'Drifting into the Abyss: Twilight Consciousness in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers'.
• Dr Fritz Wefelmeyer: '"Overcome by Horror". Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of German General Staff 1906-14, in his letters and memoirs'.
• Fadi Elhusseini: 'The Great War, the Middle East and Islam'.

Postcolonialism and Islam

Current and past academics from the English and History teams in the Department of Culture have published Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film (Routledge, 2013). The book, which had its origins in a conference held at the University of Sunderland in 2010, is edited by Drs Geoff Nash, Kath Kerr-Koch and Sarah Hackett (Bath Spa University).

The essays in the collection examine, question and broaden the applicability of Postcolonialism and Islam from a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary perspective.

Kath Kerr-Koch romances fascism

Dr Kathleen Kerr-Koch's Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley is to be published by Bloomsbury in spring 2013. In her monograph Kath takes a wide-ranging approach to the analysis of allegory as it is treated by three controversial writers whose works flank the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the middle and late periods of what we call modernity—Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the course of her study she argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour.