mortiz069

Dr Mike Pearce has joined the Editorial Board of the prestigious Cambridge University Press journal English Today . The journal provides accessible cutting-edge reports on all aspects of the language, including style, usage, dictionaries, literary language, Plain English, the Internet and language teaching, in terms of British, American and the world’s many other Englishes. Now in its third decade, English Today remains unique in its scope and style.

Dr David Fallon 's new book on William Blake has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis provides compelling new readings of Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

A West View of Newgate by George Shepherd (1784-1862) PhD student Philippa Abbott has had an article published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies . In it, she explores the representation of female criminals in 'the Newgate Novels' - a genre of sensationalist fiction popular between the 1820s and 1840s. You can read the article here .

In the first Humanities Research Seminar of 2016 Professor Angela Smith's topic is banter. It has long been recognized that jocular argument and teasing are central to social bonding.  In Western society, this is most often seen as being a feature of masculine behaviour.  Various studies (eg Gough 2001, Benwell 2006, Smith 2016); have shown that this is a central concern of male bonding, with Mike Souter (the first editor of FHM magazine) commenting that in a social group, the wittiest guy is the most popular.  However, when this is transferred to the domain of broadcast media, it has the capacity to be misinterpreted and have the opposite effect of binding social groups.  The majority of complaints sent to the BBC relate to the ‘offensive’ remarks on programmes such as Top Gear , whilst on Channel 4 the same is the case on programmes in the ‘comedy quiz panel show’ genre.  Most often this is defended as being a ‘misunderstanding’ of an in-show j...

The new edition of the Journal of Intercultural Inquiry edited by Drs Geoff Nash and Michael Pearce is out now. Its diverse articles (by authors based in India, Romania, Germany and Saudi Arabia) cover Don DeLillo and Martin Amis on 9/11, gender and translation, English in India, and the German poet Holger Benkel. Enjoy it here .

Culture PhD student Philippa Abbott has published a review in the newsletter of the British Association for Victorian Studies ( BAVS ). She looks at Victorian Popular Culture (a website from Adam Matthew's Digital) and describes it as 'an invaluable resource to any researcher or teacher with an interest in popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries'; one which brings together resources which would otherwise be difficult to access.

Dr Neil Johnson Dr Neil Johnson (Team Leader for TESOL) will be giving a talk in the Languages Research Seminar series at 5pm on Tuesday November 22nd 2016 (Forster 301).   In the increasingly globalized and digital context of higher education, with concomitant pressure to internationalize through raised proficiency standards and greater intercultural understanding, the dominant skills-based, discreet approach to language teaching may not be optimally effective. In his presentation, entitled "Understanding language and culture through multimodal text analysis", Neil will describe the Literacy-based approach to language education that seeks to address these concerns. This approach was used to re-imagine a course for second year undergraduates at a small private university in Japan, and operationalizes both reading and writing as essentially similar processes of meaning making and design (New London Group, 1996). The course was re-structured so that learners are involved in ite...