Beyond Islamophobia

Dr Geoff Nash has given an invited talk at Beyond Islamophobia, a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (June 7th and 8th 2014). Geoff's paper, entitled: 'Islamophobia, Postcolonialism, and Contemporary British Literature', probed whether contemporary British literature is Islamophobic, and what part postcolonialism plays in Islamophobic representations of Muslims in recent British writing.

Function words in UK election manifestos

Dr Michael Pearce has published an article which explores a corpus of all the UK election manifestos produced by the three main political parties in the period 1900-2010. It offers an alternative perspective on function words in corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, placing them at the centre rather than the periphery. Michael examines the collocational and colligational profiles of four key function words (will, we, our and to) and shows how a consideration of the patterns of phraseology in which these words occur can – perhaps surprisingly – reveal aspects of party ideology, as well as pointing to generic change over time.



Michael Pearce 2014. Key Function Words in a Corpus of UK Election Manifestos. Linguistik online 65: 23-44.

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.