Maria Fotiadou awarded PhD

At the graduation ceremony on Friday 30th November 2018, Maria Fotiadou will receive her PhD. After achieving a First Class degree in English Language and Literature in the School of Culture in 2014, Maria was awarded a full scholarship by the School which allowed her to pursue research under the supervision of Dr Michael Pearce and Professor Angela Smith. The thesis is a wide-ranging study of the language of careers services as it is represented on UK university websites, with a particular focus on ‘employability’. Combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, Dr Fotiadou’s research reveals the nature of the discourse surrounding this problematic concept, as shown in an extensive and innovative analysis of repeated patterns of collocation and more extended phraseological clusters in a multi-million-word corpus. Her work is beginning to have an impact in the field of critical linguistics, with a double-length article based on her thesis research appearing in the prestigious journal Critical Discourse Studies, and further articles in preparation.

Sunderland graduate awarded prestigious research scholarship

Rosie Hordon-Clark (who has a BA and MA in English from the School of Culture) has been awarded a funded, 4-year PhD Scholarship from the School of English at Dublin City University, under the supervision of Dr Gearòid O'Flaherty. Rosie will explore the relationship between Angela Carter and feminism: to what extent can Angela Carter be identified as a feminist; what kind of a feminist was Carter; and what areas of her work are at odds with feminist thought? Her research will provide a chronological analysis of a selection of Carter's work, exploring the changes in feminist positions that Carter adopts in response to the ambiguities and complexities of Second-Wave feminism.

Transgender talk

PhD student Katie Ward was invited to Longbenton High School to give a talk on gender identity to top set year elevens. The talk explored gender identity and part of Katie's research on Membership Categorisation in Transgender Communities. The students took part in activities which got them to think about their own gender identity as well as the difficulties faced by trans people. Students and staff actively participated throughout and asked some interesting and challenging questions.

PhD successes in Culture

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce four recently completed PhDs:

• Dr Marjan Shokouhi. The Nature/Culture Dichotomy in an Ecocritical Study of W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. (Supervised by Drs Alison Younger and Angela Smith)
• Dr Akram Dik. Revisiting the Concept of Displacement: Representations of Home and Identity in Contemporary English Post-colonial Metropolitan Fiction (1956-1990). (Supervised by Drs Kath Kerr-Koch and Geoff Nash)
• Dr Darren Brooks. Rankin's Scotland: Scottish Crime Fiction and The Narration of Modern Scotland. (Supervised by Dr Barry Lewis and Peter Dempsey)
• Dr Danny Crew. Published Music as Political Research Tool in American Politics. (Supervised by Dr Kevin Yuill and John Kefala-Kerr)

Dr Kim Gilligan

Dr Kim Gilligan

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce that Kim Gilligan, who is a lecturer in the Primary Education Team in the Faculty of Education and Society, has been awarded a PhD in young adult literature. The title of her thesis - which was supervised by Dr Angela Smith and Professor Gill Crozier (University of Roehampton) - is A critical analysis of the representation of male characters in Bali Rai's Unarranged Marriage and Alan Gibbons' Caught in the Crossfire.

Dr Jairus Omuteche

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce that Jairus Omuteche has been awarded a PhD. His thesis, Representations of Home in Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Toni Morrison: (Re) Vision of Identity and Belonging, was supervised by Drs Kath Kerr-Koch (Director of Studies) and Geoff Nash. Jairus began his doctoral studies - which were funded by a studentship from the Cultural and Regional Studies Beacon - in June 2010. His future research will focus on comparative and postcolonial literatures within the nexus of representations of globalization and diasporic identities and belonging. Dr Omuteche will be resuming his lectureship in the Department of Languages and Literature Studies at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology in Kenya.

Dr Abdalla Mustafa Warayet

Abdalla Warayet has been awarded a PhD in TESOL. His thesis, entitled "The influence of speech context, language mode and exposure to English on the use of English discourse markers by EFL students" explores the discourse markers used in English by two groups of Libyan EFL students: those who learned English while living in the UK accompanying parents during their postgraduate studies; and those who had never been abroad and learned the English language in Libya as a part of the school curriculum. The comparison identified how different environments affect the use of English discourse markers - words and phrases which perform a variety of functions relating mainly to structuring and organizing language - through examining the influence of speech contexts such as interviews and discussions, different modes of English use including speaking and writing, and exposure to the English language. Dr Warayet's Director of Studies was Dr Maddalena Taras (Education).

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."