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Dr Mike Pearce has been invited to speak at 'The North and Northness: Ideas of Place, Locatedness and Regions.' This half-day event organized by the Cultural Significance of Place (CSoP) interdisciplinary research group at Newcastle University, takes place on Friday 29th May 2015 . Mike's paper is entitled 'Anyone from the north east who says 'Mum' should be shot'.  The event will explore varying understandings of the North, as constructed and applied over a range of disciplines, and consider the role ‘Northness’ has played in the evolution of ideas of place, locatedness and regions. Further details can be found here .

The English Research Seminar on Wednesday 6th May will be given by Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai from Aligarh Muslim University, India. His paper is entitled '"The Challenging Gaze": Islam/Muslims in Today's Globalized World in Qaisra Shahraz's novel Revolt ' (2013). Based in Manchester, UK, Qaisra Shahraz, of Pakistani descent, seeks to recontextualize Islam with modernity in her fiction. While displaying a nuanced understanding of today’s challenges, her novels are embedded in the Islamic value system. This amalgam between tradition and modernity, especially in the context of gender parity in Muslim society is a new, interesting aspect of the discourse. All staff and students are welcome to the talk, which starts at 5pm in Priestman 313.

What are the origins and history of the ethnonym Geordie in North East England? How does this history – which according to some authorities has never adequately been explained – help us to understand its current usage and meanings? In an article published in Names: A Journal of Onomastics , Dr Michael Pearce attempts to answer these questions by drawing on evidence from a range of sources (including newly-available material in the British Newspaper Archive). Pearce, M. 2015. 'The Ethnonym Geordie in North East England.' Names: A Journal of Onomastics 63 (2): 75-85.

Dr Laura O'Brien has published an essay entitled “La moralité des mouchards: Chenu, de la Hodde et la guerre des pamphlets” [The morality of informers: Chenu, de la Hodde and the war of pamphlets]. Her work, which appears in Morales en révolutions: France, 1789-1940 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, April 2015) discusses the multifaceted ideas of ‘morality’ in a series of extremely critical contemporary ‘histories’ of the French revolution of 1848, written in 1849 and 1850 by two former police informers and intended to damage the legacy of both the revolution and 1848’s revolutionaries.

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce four recently completed PhDs: Dr Marjan Shokouhi . The Nature/Culture Dichotomy in an Ecocritical Study of W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. (Supervised by Drs  Alison Younger and Angela Smith ) Dr Akram Dik. Revisiting the Concept of Displacement: Representations of Home and Identity in Contemporary English Post-colonial Metropolitan Fiction (1956-1990). (Supervised by Drs  Kath Kerr-Koch and Geoff Nash ) Dr Darren Brooks. Rankin's Scotland: Scottish Crime Fiction and The Narration of Modern Scotland. (Supervised by Dr  Barry Lewis and Peter Dempsey ) Dr Danny Crew. Published Music as Political Research Tool in American Politics. (Supervised by Dr  Kevin Yuill and John Kefala-Kerr )

The English team has received feedback from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub-panel. In terms of publications, 'international excellence was evident in all areas, and there was the additional strength of world-leading achievement in dialect, language analysis and creative writing'. The impact of research carried out in English was deemed to be 'considerable in terms of reach and significance', with work 'embedded in and committed to enriching its local community'. The full REF results can be found here . Sunderland was one of only seven universities in the UK to enter every member of its English team for the REF.

Dr Laura O’Brien , lecturer in modern European history in the Department of Culture, will be giving a History Lab talk on Thursday 19th March at 5pm in Priestman 013 . ‘Drawing revolution: political caricature in nineteenth-century France’, is based on her research into French political caricature in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is also the subject of her forthcoming book, The Republican Line: Caricature and French Republican Identity, 1830-52 which will be published by Manchester University Press in July. All are welcome to attend the talk – it’s free for members of the History Lab and £2 for guests.