mortiz069

The Department of Culture is delighted to announce that Dr Sarah Dobbs has been appointed as lecturer in English and Creative Writing. Sarah won a Funds For Women Graduates (FfWG)   award to complete her PhD in Creative writing at Lancaster University in 2011. Her PhD explored coma as fictional space, crime, culture and masculinity and the femme fatale. Her PhD novel, Killing Daniel (Unthank Books), was published in 2012 and she recently edited and co-authored a textbook, English Language, Literature and Creative Writing: A Practical Guide for Students (Anthem Press, 2014). Previous work has been broadcast by the BBC, performed at Bolton Octagon and Cambridge ADC theatres, and published in  Flax , Stepaway magazine and Litro . She is currently at work on a novel that considers the relationship between apocalyptic fiction, illness and assisted dying. Sarah has previously taught at Lancaster, Manchester Metropolitan University, Edge Hill and the Open University, as well as on...

Café Culture is a series of free events for thinkers which aim to generate discussion, debate and a convivial atmosphere. Held in central Newcastle upon Tyne, they seek to provide a space for people to think, share ideas and to have a lively and inclusive discussion. On December 1st 2014 Dr Alison Younger gave a talk entitled 'Our Monsters: Ourselves' in which she explored the ways monsters reflect the cultural anxieties of the times in which they were spawned. Listen to the podcast here .

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce the launch of Monstrum - a journal for Spectral Visions Press . Monstrum is a celebration of all things monstrous and supernatural, from the doppelganger to Penny Dreadfuls; from folklore to Gothic of the Borders. Monstrum aims to publish the best articles on the latest thinking in Gothic and Literary studies. The deadline for proposals for our inaugural issue is 31st January 2015. The Call for Papers is available for download on the Submissions page . You can follow Monstrum on twitter or you can like Spectral Visions Press on Facebook . Monstrum Volume 1: Issue 1 will be available late 2015. For further information contact Colin Younger (colin.younger@sunderland.ac.uk).

The importance of stories written for young readers is undisputed, and in particular the central place of the fairy story in popular culture is clearly recognized. In an article published in Children's Literature in Education , Dr Angela Smith argues that whilst most of these stories are centuries old, they have been adapted by the cultures of the tellers to be more compatible with the ideological views of the audience. She explores how feminism has influenced two versions of the same story, published by the same publisher for comparable age groups through an examination of the Ladybird versions of Rapunzel as published in 1968 and 1993. Angela shows how there are subtle changes in the text which do not affect the overall narrative structure but can offer an insight into the ways in which society has ideologically positioned men and women. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) is used to show how a close linguistic analysis of the text can reveal the impact of feminism o...

Dr Laura O'Brien Sunderland historian Dr Laura O'Brien will be giving a paper for the Labour and Society Research Group, a forum jointly run by the Histories of Activism group, based at the universities of Newcastle and Northumbria. Her paper is entitled 'Histories as activism: writing the history of the 1848 revolution in France' . It takes place on Monday 8th December at 5pm in Room 35 of the Lipman Building (Northumbria University, Newcastle).

Ian Bassam (EAP team, University of Sunderland) will be presenting the final paper in the autumn semester series of English Research Seminars. It is entitled 'Include me out' and considers whether there is a barrier preventing European students from integrating into UK universities.  When? Wednesday 10th December at 5pm.  Where? Priestman 313.

Kim Willis (TESOL) has co-written an article which appears in the English Language Research (ELR) Journal . Kim and her co-author Dr Ahmad Nazari (London Metropolitan University) explore perceptions of the development of group dynamics amongst a cohort of MA TESOL students. Ahmad Nazari and Kim Willis 2014. 'One Big Happy Family? An Investigation into Students' Perceptions of Group Dynamics on an MA TESOL Program' . ELR Journal . Issue 1: 105-128.