PhD Success: Emma Cleary

Posted on by

Please join us in congratulating Emma Cleary for the submission of her PhD thesis entitled Jazz–‐Shaped Bodies: Mapping City Space, Time, and Sound in Black Transnational Literature.

Cleary’s thesis concerns “representations of the city in black transnational literature, with a focus on sonic schemas and mapping, cultural geography, posthumanist thought, and the discourse of diaspora. The research investigates the extent to which the urban landscape is figured as a panoptic structure in twentieth and twenty–‐ first century diasporic texts, and how the mimetic function of artistic performance challenges this structure”.

The work offers a comparative analysis of American, Canadian, and Caribbean landscapes and textscapes, the study of which “negotiates and transcends shifting national, cultural, and geographical borderlines and boundaries that seek to encode and enclose black subjectivity”.

This research offers important new readings of the works of James Baldwin, Earl Lovelace, Toni Morrison, and Wayde Compton.

Challenging drama on campus

Posted on by

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.

Recent publication

Image

Professor Douglas Burnham has just published The Nietzsche Dictionary, latest in the Bloomsbury series of philosophy dictionaries. A herculean task for the author, who has been described as ‘a subtle and incisive reader of Nietzsche’ providing the reader with ‘a comprehensive understanding of Nietzsche’s ideas’ – no mean feat.

The Nietzsche Dictionaryhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Nietzsche-Dictionary-Bloomsbury-Philosophy-Dictionaries/dp/1441160752

Out in time for Christmas!

 

London literati come to Stoke

Posted on by

Two novelists from the Big Smoke have recently given readings in Staffordshire. On 24th November Lottie Moggach read from Kiss Me First at the Keele Writing group. Moggach’s novel, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Guardian First Book Award, has been dubbed ‘a Facebook thriller’ and centers around a case of online identity assumed by a high-functioning autistic heroine. On 3rd December, Sathnam Sanghera discussed his novel, Marriage Material, as guest of honour at the Arnold Bennett Society annual Literary Luncheon held in Hartshill.   Marriage Material, also published 2013 and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, is set the Sikh community of Wolverhampton and is based loosely on one of Bennett’s best-known works, The Old Wives Tale. Apparently Moggach, fellow journalist and friend, was responsible for introducing Sanghera to Bennett’s novel – it’s a small world!

For more on the writers see their websites: http://www.sathnam.com/ http://www.lottiemoggach.com/

 

Can Stoke-on-Trent make you happy?

Posted on by

Matthew Rice gave a very entertaining public lecture entitled ‘Can Stoke-on-Trent make you happy?’ on Tuesday 11th, part of the University’s Centenary series.  Matthew pointed to some other European cities which have pulled themselves out of the post-industrial doldrums, discussed Stoke’s industrial and domestic architectural heritage in terms of its emotional significance for the local population, and suggested that artists could act as the “stormtroopers of regeneration”!  The next lecture in this series is by TV historian Professor Michael Wood and is entitled ‘Does History Matter?’  For further details go to: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/news/heritageinspired-public-lectures-designed-to-get-you-thinking-tcm4280835.jsp

Award Winning theatre company at the New Vic

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 →

Grasmere Trip

Posted on by

Staff and 1st year students had a great weekend in the Lake District. We visited Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth museum, eat and drank handsomely, communed with nature, and a few hardy students accompanied us to Easedale Tarn where we read Coleridge and Wordsworth. Magnificent.

More to follow from the students who were there.grasmere walk

A renascence for Arnold Bennett

Posted on by

Catherine Burgass has given another paper on Arnold Bennett, ‘The House That Bennett Built: Material Culture in Clayhanger’ in the swanky environs of Keele Hall (‘Arnold Bennett and His Circle’ conference, 18th October).  Catherine discussed the function of furniture (chairs, shelves and domestic plumbing) in Bennett’s romantic realism.

Catherine has been invited to contribute to a forthcoming volume of essays, edited by the distinguished Bennett scholar John Shapcott.  She is also giving a talk next February for the Arnold Bennett Society on food in Bennett’s fiction: http://www.arnoldbennettsociety.org.uk/?page_id=5