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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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.

Reflecting on 150 years since the abolition of public execution

PhD student Patrick Low is organizing a one-day conference to mark 150 years since the end of public execution. It takes place on June 6th 2018 at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle. The event will encourage interdisciplinary insights as well as welcoming scholars from any stage in their career. Subjects for papers may include, but are by no means limited to:

• The legislative build up to the 1868 Act
• The effect of the 1868 Act and its aftermath
• The broader changing nature of punishment
• Media representations of executions
• Individual cases and crimes
• The role of the execution crowd
• The wider impact and awareness of public executions
• Capital Punishment in the arts – including visual, design, performance, media, music and literary genres
• The science of punishment
• Global and provincial perspectives on capital punishment 

The website has more details, including a call for papers.

Postgraduate Conference 2016

We are pleased to announce the 2016 Postgraduate Conference at the University of Sunderland. This one-day multidisciplinary conference is designed to give postgraduate students from any institution an opportunity to present and discuss their research. The conference is focused on Critical Approaches to Research, and aims to encourage the development of student communication and research networks. Research students will be giving papers based on their own research and will have the opportunity to meet peers who engage in similar research activities and get valuable feedback. The event will be held on Tuesday 21st June in David Goldman Building – Room 107, St. Peter’s Campus, University of Sunderland. More information, and instructions about how to book your (FREE) place can be found here.

Refugees and asylum seekers

History and Politics are organizing a one-day event devoted to considering policy toward refugees and asylum seekers through lectures, discussion, visual displays, theatre, and Q&A.  Speakers include refugees and asylum seekers, as well as academics, members of local organisations, and politicians. Students and staff (morning and afternoon) and students, staff and members of the public (afternoon) are warmly invited to this free event, which takes place on Monday 1st February 2016. Information about booking and the full programme can be found here. The organizer is Dr Peter Hayes (Politics).

New North East symposium

The New North East one-day symposium took place on 13th July at St Peter's campus. The day - hosted by the Department of Culture and convened by Mike Pearce - saw people from all walks of life attend a wide-ranging programme of talks organized around the theme of culture in the region. Topics covered included the role of archives and museums, dialect, arts policy, and journalism. Landscape photography and poetry was also on the menu. The full programme can be found here.

The New North East

On Monday 13th July 2015 the Department of Culture will be hosting a one-day symposium focused on our region entitled ‘The New North East’. This interdisciplinary gathering - which takes place in the Prospect Building, St Peter's Campus - will bring together scholars and practitioners working in the field of ‘cultural studies’ (broadly understood to include history, literature, linguistics, visual arts and media studies). It is hoped that the forum will allow participants to share developments in their disciplines, especially those which have opened up new avenues of research and/or shed new light on more traditional objects of enquiry in the study of North East England and North East Englishness. We hope the exciting range of talks will attract interest from academics, students and members of the public from across the region. The confirmed speakers are:

• Professor John Tomaney (Bartlett School of Planning, University College London)
• Dr Adam Mearns (School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, University of Newcastle)
• Professor Sean O’Brien (School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, University of Newcastle)
• Professor John Kippin (Northern Centre of Photography, University of Sunderland)
• Ian Wylie (Editor of the Northern Correspondent)
• Bill Griffiths (Head of Programmes at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)
• Dr Natasha Vall (Teesside University)

Registration (which is free of charge) is required. You can reserve your place by visiting the University's online shop here. A free light lunch and refreshments will be provided. If you prefer not to register online, contact Dr Michael Pearce at mike.pearce@sunderland.ac.uk and he will register on your behalf.

The North in the eighteenth century

Dr David Fallon is co-organising The North in the Long Eighteenth Century. This one-day conference to be held at the Literary & Philosophical Society in Newcastle on 19th September celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies and is organized by staff from the Universities of Newcastle, Northumbria, Durham, and Sunderland. Further information and details about how to book your place (which costs £10, or £5 for students) can be found here.  

Spectral Visions III on YouTube

You can get a sense of what went on at the recent Spectral Visions III conference by visiting this YouTube channel. Highlights include Dr Alison Younger on 'Gothic Fairy Tales' and Colin Younger on 'Creating Gothic Characters'.

Spectral Visions III: The Vampire Strikes Back

The Faculty of Education and Society’s English team is holding its annual Spectral Visions Conference on 26th June 2014 at St Peter's Campus between 9am and 4pm. Sixth formers from across the region will be attending a variety of talks and workshops on topics as diverse as how monsters talk, ghosts from Goethe to Shakespeare, and angels, zombies and monsters of the First World War.

Further information can be obtained from Caroline Noble (Faculty of Education & Society, Marketing, Recruitment and Admissions Department). Email: caroline.noble@sunderland.ac.uk. And you can read the Spectral Visions blog here.

The First World War and its Global Legacies - keynotes on video

Talks by keynote speakers at the recent conference on the First World War and Its Global Legacies held at Sunderland University in April 2014 are now available to view on video.


Professor Tim Kirk (University of Newcastle)




Professor Maggie Andrews (University of Worcester)




Dr Martin Hurcombe (University of Bristol)



Professor Christopher Norris (Cardiff University)

Geoff Nash addresses the IDEA conference in Turkey

Dr Geoff Nash

Dr Geoff Nash has given a keynote address at the 8th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English (16th-18th April 2014). Geoff's talk was entitled 'Translating The East: from Orientalism to Migrant Literature'. He scrutinised theoretical approaches to colonial translation, specifically in the context of late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century Orientalism, and concluded by discussing the incorporation of aspects of referential systems outside standard British ones in the construction of Arab Anglophone fiction.    

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'.

The First World War and its Global Legacies: Keynotes announced and final call for papers

Indian soldiers on the Fricourt-Mametz Road
(Imperial War Museum)

The organizers of The First World War and its Global Legacies are pleased to announced the keynote speakers:

• Kate Adie (former BBC Journalist)
• Maggie Andrews (University of Worcester)
• Sarah Gamble (Swansea University) 
• Martin Hurcombe (University of Bristol)
• Tim Kirk (Newcastle University)
• Angela Smith (University of Sunderland)

Further details about the conference, which will be held at the University of Sunderland on the 5th-7th April 2014, can be found here.

If you wish to contribute a paper please submit a proposal (maximum 300 words) to

Dr Kathleen Kerr-Koch (kath.kerr@sunderland.ac.uk) or 

Dr Angela Smith (angela.smith@sunderland.ac.uk)

Faculty of Education and Society

Priestman Building

Green Terrace

Sunderland

SR1 3PZ

Proposals should be submitted no later than December 1st, 2013.

Conference website

The First World War and its Global Legacies: 100 Years On

The 43rd battalion of Senegalese soldiers (1918). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Call for papers

The Faculty of Education and Society at the University of Sunderland is pleased to announce a conference to be held on 5th-7th April 2014:

The First World War and its Global Legacies: 100 Years On

Keynote Speaker: Kate Adie

A three-day international conference will explore the impact of this first truly global war on the history, culture, philosophy, language and politics of the 100 years following it.   Papers are invited from the international scholar’s community in English in a wide a range of disciplines – history, politics, world literatures, philosophy, sociology, human geography, media, critical and cultural studies, international law, linguistics, colonial and postcolonial studies.

History conference for sixth formers

Martin Luther King Jr.

On 11th September the History and Politics team will be welcoming over 120 sixth formers and their teachers from across the North East to a conference entitled 'Politics, Power and Rights'. The conference opens with a keynote address by Professor Clive Webb from Sussex University on British race relations and the American Civil Rights Movement. This is followed by parallel workshop sessions on a variety of topics, led by History and Politics staff, including 'Civil Rights before Brown v. Board of Education' (Dr Kevin Yuill); ''Charitable hatred': toleration after the Reformation' (Dr Delphine Doucet); 'Kings and Queens versus Social History' (Dr Peter Hayes). There will also be sessions on the Great Northern Coalfield 1700-1945 (Dr Stuart Howard), Britain between the two world wars (Dr Keith Wilson), revolutionary 'people' in the nineteenth century (Dr Laura O'Brien), and the second world war as a turning point for Britain (Dr Simon Henig). The closing keynote address, which reconsiders Martin Luther King's civil rights legacy, will be given by Dr Kevin Yuill.

PhD student chairs panel at international conference

Department of Culture PhD student Marjan Shokouhi will be chairing a panel at 'New Crops, Old Fields: (Re)Imagining Irish Folklore', an interdisciplinary conference to be held at Queen's University Belfast (5th-7th September 2013). The panel, entitled 'Re-Imagining Storytelling', is made up of scholars from the USA, Canada and Ireland. Marjan, whose PhD research is on Irish poetry and ecocriticism, is also on the organizing committee of the conference.

Spectral Visions II online

Keynote lectures from the Spectral Visions II conference can be viewed below.

Dr Alison Younger (Sunderland University) on 'Gothic Monstrosities'

Professor John Strachan (Bath Spa University) on 'Gothic and Surrealism'

Celtic Gothic conference announcement

The North East Irish Culture Network (NEICN) in association with the Department of Culture at the University of Sunderland presents Celtic Gothic: Degeneration and Regeneration.

James Hogg (1770-1835).  Author of  The 

Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 

‘There is’ according to Alan Bissett, ‘something/someone/somebody that haunts the fringes of the Scottish imagination…perhaps the whisper of history, pain, feudalism, legend, all or none of these things, but undoubtedly Scotland’s is a fiction haunted by itself, one in a perpetual state of Gothicism.' As numerous scholars have argued, the same applies to Ireland,

Spectral Visions II: The Revenge

Following the success of Spectral Visions in 2012, the MA English team present Spectral Visions II: The Revenge, which takes place at the St. Peter's Campus of the University of Sunderland on Friday June 21st 2013.

The keynote speakers are Willy Hughes and John Strachan, from Bath Spa University, and Franklin Bishop (Newstead Abbey). Professor Hughes will be speaking on vampires in Gothic fiction and Professor Strachan will consider Surrealism and Gothic. Franklin Bishop's topic is John Polidori's The Vampyre.