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PhD student Patrick Low is organizing a one-day conference to mark 150 years since the end of public execution. It takes place on June 6th 2018 at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle. The event will encourage interdisciplinary insights as well as welcoming scholars from any stage in their career. Subjects for papers may include, but are by no means limited to: The legislative build up to the 1868 Act The effect of the 1868 Act and its aftermath The broader changing nature of punishment Media representations of executions Individual cases and crimes The role of the execution crowd The wider impact and awareness of public executions Capital Punishment in the arts – including visual, design, performance, media, music and literary genres The science of punishment Global and provincial perspectives on capital punishment  The website has more details, including a call for papers.

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2017 to Kazuo Ishiguro , prompted Tencent - China's largest social media site - to contact Dr Barry Lewis , who has published widely on the Anglo-Japanese novelist. Read the interview here . Kazuo Ishiguro

Professor Angela Smith has edited a collection of essays about Spare Rib , one of the most iconic symbols of Second Wave Feminism, whose influence has far out-lived the span of its publication (1972-1993).  Re-Reading Spare Rib (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) examines various aspects of the magazine - based on the digitised publication by the British Library in 2015 - in order to explore the ways in which it has influenced society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the lives of individual readers. By analysing several articles from a modern, post-feminist perspective, and using cross-generational interviews of Spare Rib readers and reflective accounts of reading the publication, the significance and endurance of the publication is demonstrated. Written by academics, experienced researchers and independent scholars alike, the inter-disciplinary nature of the text results in a multi-dimensional reading of Spare Rib suitable for both an academic and gen...

Dr Kevin Yuill (with Joe Street of Northumbria University) has edited a book entitled, The Second Amendment and Gun Control, Freedom, Fear, and the American Constitution (Routledge 2018). The collection of essays situates discussion about gun controls within contemporary debates about citizenship, culture, philosophy and foreign policy as well as in the more familiar terrain of politics and history. It features experts on the Constitution as well as chapters discussing the symbolic importance of Annie Oakley, the role of firearms in race, and filmic representations of armed Hispanic girl gangs. It asks about the morality of gun controls and of not imposing them. Published in the spirit of open debate about contentious subjects, it is finely balanced between those who favour more gun controls and those who oppose them. Dr Yuill’s chapter - 'From Virtuous Armed Citizen to "Cramped Little Risk-Fearing Man": The Meaning of Firearms in an Insecure Era' – argu...