I was in that London at the weekend to see the RSC’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (which we study in Make it New: American writing 1900-1950). During the day we took in the London Eye and the new cable car across the Thames at Greenwich. We separated these panoptical pursuits with lunch at the Tate and some contemplative time with Rothko’s magnificent explorations of colour, shade and shape.
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Dr Catherine Burgass joins English as an Honorary Research Fellow
Stoke Literary Festival
Here are Catherine Burgass and Ray Johnson presenting their talk on ‘Arthur Berry – People’s Poet’ at the second Hot Air Literary Festival (13th June):
Ray and Catherine discussed Berry’s painting, poetry and plays, all of which articulate strongly a sense of regional idenitity, via images, film clips and dramatic readings. They also launched a new edition of Berry’s poetry collection Dandelions: http://www.filmarchive.org.uk/products/dandelions
Catherine was particularly excited to meet Margaret Drabble – taught on this year’s feminism module From Rage to Page. Interviewed by Sathnam Sanghera about her most recent novel The Pure Gold Baby, Drabble clearly believed that conditions for women had improved significantly since the 1960s. Catherine was able to get her mother’s original 1960s paperbacks signed and let Dame Margaret know that the political issues dramatised in these second-wave feminist fictions still speak to women of today, if student response is anything to go by!
PhD success
Our congratulations go to Emma Cleary who successfully defended her PhD thesis, ‘Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping City Space, Time, and Sound in Black Transnational Literature’, last Thursday. The examiners, Dr.s Mark Brown form Staffs and Brian Jarvis from Loughborough), praised the work for its conceptual sophistication, its wide-ranging approach to Black transnational literature (the US, Canada and the Caribbean; the novel, short story and spoken word poetry and rap), and its precision of expression and presentation. The project was supervised by Dr Lisa Mansell.
Congratulations Dr Cleary!
Emma (center) with the examiners (right) and her supervision team.
Challenging drama on campus
3rd year drama students, as the Axiom Theatre Company, produced Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis in Studio 2 on the College Road Campus this week. This is a challenging work, debuting posthumously after Kane’s suicide in 1999 and exploring the dark areas of the mind. The staging needs to be imaginative as Kane’s script provides us only with the lines of dialogue, leaving the director to establish who speaks and the context. The director chose to interpret the dialogue as shared between a doctor and a number of patients, each demonstrating different symptoms displayed by the lines in the text. The company’s imaginative construction of back-stories for their characters was an innovative dimension to the actual staging.
It was good to see English and CW students – some of whom will be studying Kane’s Blasted next term – supporting their drama peers.
Award Winning theatre company at the New Vic
Staff and students were at the New Vic to see Northern Broadside’s production of She Stoops to Conquer. It was an outrageous interpretation of the play’s themes of love and class; matched only by the outrageous wigs. Students repaired to the Victoria, where they ended up in conversation with the cast.
Writing and Recovery
Staffs lecturer and poet, Barry Taylor, on a project to use arts and creativity in the recovery process for addicts
To Dublin and Kilkenny in Independent Study Week week for a meeting of the European partners in Typecast, a collaborative project between the British Ceramics Biennial and Portraits of Recovery, a leader in developing arts and creative initiatives to support the drugs and alcohol recovery process. Continue reading