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Professor Angela Smith  has given a paper at the  26th Ross Priory International Seminar on Broadcast Talk 2018 . Entitled 'Slow tv: the mesmerising antidote to political maelstroms', her talk traced the emergence of 'slow TV' as the antithesis of the fast-edited, fast-paced television that has developed as the dominant concept of the medium in the twenty-first century.  More recently, it has been heralded as the antidote to the rise of right-wing populist noise.  Whilst the early cable channels showed ambient images of burning fires or tropic fish tanks, slow tv is slightly more dynamic and deliberately edited to be relaxing as well as informative.  Many of the visual tropes in slow tv come from arthouse cinema, particularly the lingering shots and sense of stillness. Unlike ambient tv, it has a narrative but not all of them have a narrator.  The narrative is sometimes left to the viewer to work out, such as the original slow tv show,  Train Ride: Ber...

A new novella by Dr Sarah Dobbs is due out in the autumn.  The Sea Inside Me (Unthank Books) is set in an England ravaged by civil strife and terrorism. An experimental zone, Newark-by-the-Sea has trialed the Process, the removal of traumatic memories to eliminate crime and fear from the minds of its citizens. Processing Officer Audrey is instructed to tail Candy, a girl resistant to the Process, whose memories are returning, As the Process is about to be rolled out countrywide, a darker, deep-rooted conspiracy coils smoke-like into view. Read more about this title on Unthank Book's website .

Replica Viking ships in Catoira, Galicia (Source: Wikipedia) Dr Miguel Gomes has recently spoken at the International Medieval Congress  at the University of Leeds (Europe's largest gathering in the humanities).  In his paper, entitled 'Vikings in Galicia: Popular memory, festivities and traces of the resistance' , Miguel examined Nordic incursions in the northwest of the Iberian peninsular, considering the way in which over two hundred years of Viking activity in Galicia had an impact on the local landscape as recently analysed by H. Pires (2017), and how those changes might have inspired the formation of many local legends, tales, and celebrations which have kept the Viking element alive in the landscape of people’s minds.  

We all know that novels are more than just stories; they often tell us about our lives and ourselves. This talk by Guy Mankowski  will consider how writers have taken fiction to its limit by questioning how we live now and how we might live in the future. Guy’s novel How I Left The National Grid examined how, in postmodern culture, subculture and nostalgia offer people some room to shape the world they want to live in. From the future societies described in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the exotic technologies in JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands , this session will also look at how literary fiction has imagined - and proposed - synthetic futures. Dr Guy Mankowski is the author of four novels: Letters from Yelena (Legend Press) was awarded an Arts Council Literature grant, used in GCSE training material by Osiris in 2015, and adapted for the stage. How I Left The National Grid (Zer0 Books) was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing and published in the UK, US and Canada...

Dr Miguel Gomes (Languages) has published a chapter entitled 'Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxon Hero’s Journey through the Labyrinth'. Miguel uses the idea of labyrinth as a symbolic landscape to explain the structure of  Beowulf . He argues that the poem presents an intricate design in which elements such as alliterative patterns, repetitions, variations, recurrent themes and other additions form a maze resembling the journey that the hero himself will have to undertake. To a certain extent, this structure resembles the curvilinear and rectilinear patterns of contemporary decorative art, as seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells. Miguel claims that the labyrinth, conceived as a metaphor, a physical and a mental representation, could well be a more comprehensive alternative to previous proposals for the analysis of the poem. He supports this assertion by analysing different passages that connect with the idea of labyrinth, c...

  Matthew Thomas, a third year history undergraduate, has received a bursary from the Society for the Study of Labour History , enabling him to visit Norfolk Record Office and collect important documents regarding the Burston School Strike, the longest strike in British history (1914-1939). The findings from this research will be revealed in Matthew's dissertation, a study of the role of school strikes in labour history. The main focus is on the Burston and Washington/Usworth strikes, which were vastly different in their execution, but had similar aims. Matthew's research in Norfolk unearthed some invaluable documents, including a copy of the school log book for the Burston and Shimpling School which describes the conduct of the school and gives details of the attendance rates and disciplinary action under Mrs. Higdon, the headmistress and wife of a Labour activist. This material helped Matthew to provide the necessary context for the dispute between the lo...

Professor Angela Smith has recently given a paper at the 'Approaches to Discourse' conference at Georgetown University (Washington DC). She spoke on the concept of hypermasculinity, which was first theorised in the early 1980s. At that time masculinity was often perceived as being under threat from the great advances in gender equality made following the arrival of Second Wave Feminism.  Angela argued that in the last five years we have seen a rise in the performance of hypermasculinity on the national stage, often aligned with right wing politics and a heightened sense of national identity in face of a perceived over-reaching of liberalism.  Angela's paper explored how some politicians use social media to promote their messages, side-stepping the otherwise regulating voice of the mainstream media. She looked at tweets from the personal account of Donald Trump to offer an explanation for at least part of the appeal of the ‘Make America...