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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.

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...

'Britain,' chapter 33 in Waïl Hassan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions , outlines the work of Arab British writers in the context of the volume’s examination of worldwide fiction in many languages by writers of Arab ethnicity. 'A fundamental aesthetic: Said Nursi’s re-writing of the Qur’an into the idiom of modernity' appears in Bridging the Divide: Essays on Language and Literature, and Islamic Studies – A Commemorative volume to mark the 60th birthday of Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai (New Delhi: Viva books).  The piece discusses the Kurdish-Turkish Muslim revivalist Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s project of re-writing Islam into a modern idiom.

Once again, several members of the School of Culture will be taking part in the Sunderland Libraries Literature Festival (download the full programme here ). These events feature our staff/students: Colin Younger (Senior Lecturer): Expressive Writing as Therapy, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 10th October 3-4.30pm This workshop will explore expressive writing approaches to support mental health well-being as part of Mental Health Day. Dr Alison Younger (Senior Lecturer): Folklore and Fable in the North East, Houghton Library, 16th October 2-3pm This session will explore the extraordinary folklore and fables of North East England. Short Story Competition Launch , Waterstones, The Bridges, 16th October 5pm In association with Waterstones, the University of Sunderland will launch a Short Story Competition. Dr Geoff Nash (Senior Lecturer): The Gothic Terrorist: from Robespierre to Jihadi John City, Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 18th October 5-6.30pm Gothic, terroris...

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 .

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 Geoff Nash 's article 'Postmodernism' is an entry in Gale's newly published Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (ed. Richard C. Martin, Gale 2016) .  It outlines how Islam was viewed by a postmodern philosopher such as Foucault, what Muslim intellectuals like Ziauddin Sardar, Salman Sayyid and Anouar Majid have written about postmodernism, and how Muslim writers and film-makers have responded creatively to the postmodern period. 

William Gifford Palgrave, 1868 © National Portrait Gallery, London The next talk in this semester's series of English research seminars will be given by Dr Geoff Nash . Drawing on the National Portrait Gallery’s current display , Geoff will consider the extraordinary life of the leading British explorer and scholar of the Middle East, William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888), assessing his adoption of disguise, and his reputation as a 'brilliant failure'. After serving for a time in the Indian army, Palgrave converted to Roman Catholicism and worked as a missionary in southern India until 1853. He began his long engagement with the Arab world in 1855 as a missionary in Syria, where he witnessed the persecution of Syrian Christians. Palgrave’s most notable achievement lay in exploring Arabia, which had for years been closed to Europeans. In 1862 and 1863 he became the first Westerner to cross Arabia by a diagonal route, from north-west to south-east, travelling in disguise and a...

Dr Geoff Nash has contributed an essay to a new critical edition of Ameen Rihani's 1911 novel The Book of Khalid (2016, Syracus University Press, edited with an Introduction by Todd Fine) . Geoff discusses the novel in relation to Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran and the migrant scene in New York and Boston in the first decades of the twentieth century, foregrounding the contemporary vogue for Arab/Oriental writers and discussing in particular their championing by influential American women.

Dr Geoff Nash has had an article published on 'Orientalism' in The Encyclopedia of Empire (John Wiley, 2016). Geoff shows how the term is first used in the late 18th century to refer to scholarly study of the East and a style in the arts. In the same period the British East India Company was expanding its control of the Indian subcontinent, while in Islamic domains Napoleon's expedition to Egypt of 1798 was followed by French colonization of Algeria beginning in 1830. The British decision to demote Eastern languages and culture in India in favor of education in Western knowledge signaled the emergence of an imperialistic sense of Western superiority. As orientalism became institutionalized in Europe, it contributed to imperialist governance in the East. However, the extent to which orientalists individually and collectively were responsible for buttressing imperialist ideology was not fully debated until the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. Click here ...

William Gifford Palgrave © National Portrait Gallery, London Dr Geoff Nash will be giving the lunchtime lecture at the National Portrait Gallery on 21st January 2016 (1.15pm). Drawing on the Gallery’s current display , Geoff looks at the extraordinary life of the leading British explorer and scholar of the Middle East, William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888). After serving for a time in the Indian army, Palgrave converted to Roman Catholicism and worked as a missionary in southern India until 1853. He began his long engagement with the Arab world in 1855 as a missionary in Syria, where he witnessed the persecution of Syrian Christians. Palgrave’s most notable achievement lay in exploring Arabia, which had for years been closed to Europeans. In 1862 and 1863 he became the first Westerner to cross Arabia by a diagonal route, from north-west to south-east, travelling in disguise and at great risk as a European. A deep interest in identity, whether racial, national and religious is made evi...

Geoff Nash and Mike Pearce are pleased to announce that the first issue of the Journal of Intercultural Inquiry   has been published online. It presents the work of scholars from the USA, Russia, Hungary, Lebanon and the UK. Readers will encounter a variety of articles on intercultural themes, including a study of a Neo-Latin inscription on a gravestone on Lindisfarne, an essay about a community of poets based in the Faculty of Asian and African Studies at the State University of St. Petersburg, and an analysis of linguistic codeswitching between Mandarin and English in a US university. The journal has received generous financial support from Scientia Educational Services .

Dr Geoff Nash’s article 'Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s Quest for the Religion of Modernity' has just been published in the latest issue of Religion & Literature . His article shows how Renan and Arnold’s search for a suitable religion for modernity found a focus in Gobineau’s writings about Persian Shi’ism and Babism. Each descried in these manifestations of religious feeling  solvents for the agnostic scientism of Europe, even while their observations remained meshed into the Victorian conflation of race and modernity.

The Department of Culture, in conjunction with Scientia , is pleased to announce the launch of a new academic journal. The Journal of Intercultural Inquiry , which is edited by Drs Geoff Nash and Mike Pearce , is a refereed, peer-reviewed publication for scholars, researchers, students, and teachers who are interested in intercultural engagement in a globalized world. The journal offers a forum for critical debate and publication of research in the expanding field of intercultural inquiry. We see the concepts underpinning this area of study as fluid, dynamic and diverse, enlisting a variety of views and perspectives. The approach is interdisciplinary and its remit widely construed to include: language and communications, foreign languages, applied linguistics and translation, literary, historical, cultural and sociological studies, law, political science and international relations. For further information, visit the website or email jiiscientia@sunderland.ac.uk.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–98) Dr Geoff Nash gave the annual Sir Syed Memorial Lecture to the Aligarh Muslim University Alumni Association (UK) at 41 Fitzroy Sq. London on October 19, 2014. His address was entitled; 'Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Postcolonial Age'. Geoff discussed the conundrum of this great Victorian Indian thinker, reformer and seminal figure of Islamic Modernism being today well known but little studied. He discussed Sayyid Ahmad's attitudes toward British imperialism and modern Islam in the context of today's religious extremism and the contribution of British Muslims of South Asian origin to multicultural Britain.