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Once again, the School of Culture was well represented at the annual Sunderland Libraries Literature Festival, with talks by Dr Geoff Nash on the sea as literary imagery from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the novels of Amitav Ghosh; Dr Delphine Doucet on 'religion at the dinner table - a sixteenth century dialogue'; Dr Miguel Gomes on the Codex Amiatinus.  The festival also saw the launch of the latest offerings from Spectral Visions Press - the School's own in-house student-led publishing company.

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.  

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...

Dr. Miguel Gomes (Languages) will be giving a talk about the proliferation of film (sub)versions of the Old English poem Beowulf , particularly in the last twenty years. His talk, entitled 'And this shall be a place of merriment, joy, and fornication': Representing the monstrous other in Beowulf and its cinematic adaptations, explores  how the process of adapting early medieval heroic narratives and the alterity of monstrosities to the medium of film has led to new representations of Evil in popular medievalism. Miguel argues that a process of transformation, caused by modern sensibilities and fantasies about ‘anything medieval’, has produced a number of cinematic adaptations of the Anglo-Saxon poem in which Evil has been sexualized and the hero has been portrayed as undoubtedly guilty. In order to account for these changes, the nature of film as a medium and its multiple social and commercial implications will be considered in detail. Time: Wednesday 16th November ...

Several members of the School of Culture will be taking part in the Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival this autumn. Click on the links below to find out who will be doing what and where. The festival starts on September 30th (the full schedule is here ). Spectral Visions book launch Against the Grayne: Learning about your Reiver ancestry Witchcraft and wizardry in Wearside Northern Gothic: Jane Harvey's The Castle at Tynemouth (1806) Eternity in an hour: William Blake and popular music Gothic Wearside World books to read before you die Apples and Snakes performance poetry Flash Fiction in a flash: how to write it and how to get it published Reading philosophy to lose weight The terrorist novel from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent to Hamid Mohsen's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Of Peter and Jemima: An introduction to the extraordinary life of Beatrix Potter 'Not quite a Geordie': The ethnonyms of North East England Wizards, goblins and forbidden l...

Dr Sheila Walsh (French) is pleased to announce the inaugural event in a new research seminar series. Dr Miguel Gomes (Spanish) will present 'The Challenge of Translating Literature: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Words.' The talk will take place on Monday 30th November at 5pm in Forster 302 . All welcome.