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PhD candidate Patrick Low has published an article on the changing presentation of punishment, in particular execution. This topic has been at the heart of much criminal historiography. However, little work has been done to examine the transition outside of London. Newcastle offers a fascinating perspective on any national picture of capital punishment, as it adopted changes far later than most, including close neighbours like Durham. In this article - which appears in Law, Crime & History - Patrick questions why so late a transition occurred and what the motivating factors were. Focusing on executions between 1844 and 1863 it shows that far from being led by London, the decisions were largely reactive to immediate crises, chief amongst them an unruly crowd, and not underpinned by any ideological bent. In short, it will argue for caution in speaking of a unified national change in punishment when even to speak of a regional one is problematic.   Read 'The changing p...

Dr Steve Cannon In this Languages and TESOL research seminar, Dr. Steve Cannon (Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, University of Sunderland) will be addressing the topic of awards ceremonies. These events have received little attention from Film Studies academics, most often represented simply by listings of winners in general histories. Quite apart from their marketing role for the industry as a whole, and promoting (and sometimes reviving) particular films, awards ceremonies are also themselves a space for performance and popular entertainment, reflected in their lengthy primetime broadcast slots.   In his paper, entitled 'The Politics of the Awards Ceremony: The ‘Goya’ Awards of the Spanish Film Academy, 2003 and 2004',  Steve will analyse the ways in which ceremonies also offer a space for political statements and mobilisations, echoing and expressing wider social and political struggles but also intervening in them in specific and sometimes organised ways. ...

School of Culture PhD student Malik Alkhawaldeh will be speaking at the next Cross-discipline research seminar in the series. His topic is ecocriticism in Assia Djebar's Children of the New World , Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North and Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt . It takes place on Thursday 22nd February at 2pm (there will also be two other talks from research students from Business and Pharmacy).

Dr Sarah Hellawell The School is pleased to welcome to its ranks Dr Sarah Hellawell, who has been appointed Lecturer in Modern British History. Before joining us Sarah taught at Northumbria University, where she also completed her doctoral research. Her PhD examined the British Women’s International League (WIL), an organisation that campaigned for peace, disarmament and international law, alongside goals for women’s rights. Aspects of this research have been published in Women’s History Review and in a forthcoming book chapter for an edited collection on the history of the Union of International Associations.  In 2017, Sarah was Research Associate on the ' British Ex-Service Students and the Re-building of Europe Project, 1919-1926 '. She conducted archival research in London and the North-East of England on the history of student activism after the First World War.  Funded by the AHRC World War One Engagement Centre at the University of Hertfordshire and led by academics a...

Dr Geoffrey Nash has recently visited the Aligarh Muslim University under an academic exchange programme undertaken as part of the Sir Syed Bicentenary celebrations. He engaged around 110 AMU faculty members and research scholars for workshops and tutorials on academic writing. The English Department also organized a three-day special lecture series delivered on 17th, 19th and 22nd of January. In the lecture, ‘From Postcolonialism to Islamophobia: An Academic’s Research Trajectory’, Dr Nash traced his journey as a scholar aiming to understand the East. In ‘Postcolonial Translation: The Arabic and the Anglophone Arab Novel’, he focused on the publishing industry and explicated how fiction writers from Arab countries struggle to get a wider audience for their works. In the last lecture on ‘Post 9/11 Writing and Islamophobia: Martin Amis’s Last Days of ‘Muhammad Atta’”, discussion focused on the problematic manner of representation of the mind of an ‘Islamic Fundame...

Professor Angela Smith will be giving a talk in the School of Culture research seminar series. Her focus is Channel 4’s Naked Attraction . This is a show that opens with the assertion that ‘Online dat ing has been a complete nightmare […] with the status symbols we wear getting in the way of finding our perfect mate.’  With full nudity, lingering close-ups and graphic descriptions, many viewers took to Twitter to express dismay that the show had made it to mainstream television, and led to the Guardian referring to it as symptomatic of the dystopian media landscape of 2016. Angela's paper will explore how the shock of graphic nudity is ameliorated by the linguistic strategies of positive politeness that all participants seem to collude with. Such amelioration would appear to be a defence against accusations of voyeuristic and pornographic content on mainstream television. Wednesday 21 March 2018 Reg Vardy 104A, 4pm-5pm Light refreshments and Q&A after the talk