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Colin Younger and Alison Younger have collaborated on a chapter which will appear in an edited collection called Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The volume, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, examines the concept of landscape as a multitude of places and spaces haunted by spectres, memory, trauma and nostalgia in literature, art and film from Victorian times to the present. Colin and Alison's chapter is called 'The Supernatural Borders: on Reivers, Revenants and Redcaps'.

  PhD student Maria Fotiadou has given a paper at an interdisciplinary symposium in the humanities and social sciences organized by the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group and held at Newcastle University (18th May 2016). Her talk, entitled 'Careers advisers' expert roles in UK university websites', examined a corpus consisting of approximately 2.6 million words from 58 UK Universities' Careers and Employability webpages. Her analysis looked at collocations of the keyword 'careers', then considered personal and impersonal self-representation as revealed in high-frequency phraseological patterns.

Dr Mike Pearce has been invited to give a talk at the Centre of Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences at Newcastle University . His topic is the linguistic landscape of North East England. Research on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology has shown that North East English is one of the most widely recognized and positively evaluated varieties in Britain. There is a rich tradition of dialect writing associated with the region, and a long history of both 'folk' and scholarly attention to local forms of language - for example, it is the only part of England to have a major corpus devoted to it: the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English at Newcastle University. However, one element is missing from the otherwise well-charted dialectological terrain: an account of localized forms in the 'linguistic landscape' (that is, the public display and representation of written language on road signs, advertisements, house names, vehicles, and so o...

Culture PhD student Maria Fotiadou has had a review of Michael Farrelly's Discourse and Democracy: Critical Analysis of the Language of Government (Routledge, 2015) published in Critical Discourse Studies .

The History Society is pleased to announce that  Professor Rosalie David (University of Manchester) will be giving a talk on recent research on the topic of pharmacy in Ancient Egypt. The event is free to all and takes place on Wednesday 13th April 5-6.30pm in Priestman 118.

Patrick Low History PhD student Patrick Low will be giving a talk at a one-day conference to be held at Durham University on Saturday 12th March 2016 . The conference focuses on Victorian culture's creation, maintenance and promulgation of disciplines, covering the period of the long nineteenth century. Patrick's talk is entitled 'Dying in Private and the Death of Public Discipline: Execution in the North East, 1868-1878'. The full programme is here .

Dr Dale Townshend The next English research seminar features Dr Dale Townshend (University of Stirling) on Wednesday 16th March at 5pm in Priestman 216 . He will be giving a talk on Walpole's  The Castle of Otranto  (1765). Ever since Walpole disclosed the authorship of his ‘Gothic Story’ in the second edition, it has been assumed that the ‘real’ and ‘particular’ castle to which he, in his guise as the ‘translator’ William Marshal, referred in the Preface to the first edition of the novel was Strawberry Hill, the ‘little Gothic castle’ in Twickenham that he had set about ‘Gothicizing’ since the late 1740s. However, according to Dr Townshend this is really only half of the story, for while the castle at Otranto certainly, as Walpole would later phrase it, ‘puts one in mind’ of Strawberry Hill, it also looks to the architectural formations of ‘ancient’ or ‘Gothic’ romance for its structure, its effects, and even its eventual disappearance. More specifically, Manfred’s cast...