mortiz070

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...

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).

Heather Askwith Heather Askwith is a new Creative Writing PhD student in the School of Culture, under the supervision of Dr Sarah Dobbs . She is writing a novel called Resurrection Man as part of her thesis, which seeks to explore fears around the body from the Victorian Era and the parallels between this and contemporary fears. The novel will be set in two time periods and seeks to evoke the style of these periods as an exploration of narratology. In parallel with the writing of the novel, Heather will research the connections between gothic Victorian writing, modern horror writing and self-reflexive styles. She is interested in the development of horror fiction in response to developments in science and medicine. Her thesis seeks to explore the presentation of fears surrounding the body both in Victorian Gothic literature, and in contemporary modern texts, also considering a feminist angle and the presentation of female bodies.  Heather has been writing creatively for five years...

PhD student Patrick Low has taken on the role of Online Exhibition Creator for the University of Leicester's Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse. This Wellcome Trust funded project e xplores the criminal corpse from the disciplines of archaeology, medical and criminal history, folklore, literature and philosophy, revealing the ways in which its power was harnessed, by whom, and to what ends in Britain between the late seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Patrick was approached by the project team after they had read his blog on execution in North East England: Last Dying Words . You can visit the website here .                                   William Heath (1829): Burke and Hare suffocating Mrs Docherty for sale to Dr Knox;                  satirizing Wellington and Peel extinguishing the constitution for Catholic eman...

PhD student Maria Fotiadou has recently given a paper at the 9th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (Birmingham University). Her paper explored the issue of competitiveness in the ‘graduate job market’ and the notion of ‘employability’, as presented by Universities in the UK through their career services webpages. It is part of a wider project that seeks to understand the role of careers services inside academia. With a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis methods and Corpus Linguistics tools, the analysis focuses on identifying, interpreting, explaining and evaluating (Baker and McEnery, 2015, pp. 2-3) the ‘reality’ presented by these services as students are expected to ‘invest’ their time at university in getting prepared for the transition from HE to the workplace.

A West View of Newgate by George Shepherd (1784-1862) PhD student Philippa Abbott has had an article published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies . In it, she explores the representation of female criminals in 'the Newgate Novels' - a genre of sensationalist fiction popular between the 1820s and 1840s. You can read the article here .

Culture PhD student Philippa Abbott has published a review in the newsletter of the British Association for Victorian Studies ( BAVS ). She looks at Victorian Popular Culture (a website from Adam Matthew's Digital) and describes it as 'an invaluable resource to any researcher or teacher with an interest in popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries'; one which brings together resources which would otherwise be difficult to access.

Culture PhD student Patrick Low  has been asked by Newcastle's Live Theatre to co-convene a panel for a post-performance talk on pseudoscience for their latest play called, Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing . The talk is to be given by Dr Ella Dzelzainis, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University and co-author of Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire (2010). More details about the event, which takes place on 20th November 2016, can be found here .

Katie Ward (Culture), Ammar Said Suliman (Pharmacy) and Olugbenga Oyeniyi (Pharmacy)     Culture PhD student Katie Ward has won first prize in the Regional Three Minute Thesis competition, in which 14 competitors from across North East England had to summarize their research in three minutes to an audience and panel of judges. Students from Sunderland swept the board, taking the top-three slots.

We are pleased to announce the 2016 Postgraduate Conference at the University of Sunderland. This one-day multidisciplinary conference is designed to give postgraduate students from any institution an opportunity to present and discuss their research. The conference is focused on Critical Approaches to Research, and aims to encourage the development of student communication and research networks. Research students will be giving papers based on their own research and will have the opportunity to meet peers who engage in similar research activities and get valuable feedback. The event will be held on Tuesday 21st June in David Goldman Building – Room 107, St. Peter’s Campus, University of Sunderland . More information, and instructions about how to book your (FREE) place can be found here .

  PhD student Maria Fotiadou has given a paper at an interdisciplinary symposium in the humanities and social sciences organized by the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group and held at Newcastle University (18th May 2016). Her talk, entitled 'Careers advisers' expert roles in UK university websites', examined a corpus consisting of approximately 2.6 million words from 58 UK Universities' Careers and Employability webpages. Her analysis looked at collocations of the keyword 'careers', then considered personal and impersonal self-representation as revealed in high-frequency phraseological patterns.

Culture PhD student Maria Fotiadou has had a review of Michael Farrelly's Discourse and Democracy: Critical Analysis of the Language of Government (Routledge, 2015) published in Critical Discourse Studies .

Patrick Low History PhD student Patrick Low will be giving a talk at a one-day conference to be held at Durham University on Saturday 12th March 2016 . The conference focuses on Victorian culture's creation, maintenance and promulgation of disciplines, covering the period of the long nineteenth century. Patrick's talk is entitled 'Dying in Private and the Death of Public Discipline: Execution in the North East, 1868-1878'. The full programme is here .

John Kippin - Kielder On 23rd January 2016 , history PhD student Patrick Low  will take part in an event at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland. He and Emeritus Professor of photography at Sunderland John Kippin will be in conversation with photographer Danni Harper on the subject of social memory and the landscape. Further details can be found here .  

Are you a postgraduate research student in the Faculty of Education and Society? If so, you might be interested in a development led by PhD students in the Department of Culture. More details can be found on the group's  website . They also tweet   here .

In July, PhD student Maria Fotiadou attended the 8th International Corpus Linguistics Conference ( CL2015 ) at Lancaster University. She gave a poster presentation entitled 'Have you developed your entrepreneurial skills? Looking back to the development of a skills-oriented Higher Education.' You can read the poster abstract here .

Sophie Raine Sophie Raine, who holds a BA in English and Creative Writing and an MA in English Studies from Sunderland, has been awarded a scholarship at Lancaster University to pursue doctoral studies. Her project is entitled 'The Body Currency: Consumer Culture as the Catalyst for Exploitation in Victorian Gothic Literature' and it will explore the role of commodity fetishism and consumer culture in a wide range of popular and canonical texts, analysing their role in both the oppression and liberation of marginalized groups. 

Source: Wikipedia On February the 18th 2015, Newcastle's Literary & Philosophical Society (The Lit & Phil) will host a study afternoon featuring a wide-range of short talks from academics and Lit & Phil members on the society's history and archives. Amongst the speakers will be PhD student Patrick Low , who will give a talk entitled 'Capital Punishment, Phrenology and the Lit & Phil: The curious case of the “Bumpologist” Mayor, John Fife.' There will also be a ‘show-and-tell’ session and an opportunity to browse through a sample of the Lit & Phil’s collections. Read the full programme here .

Source: Wikipedia Philippa Abbott, a doctoral student in English, will be speaking about nineteenth-century crime fiction at Newcastle University on Thursday 12th February. Her talk forms part of the second Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies Postgraduate Research Conversation of 2014/15. The Research Conversation will take place in the Armstrong Building from 4pm-6pm. All are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion. More details can be found here . The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies (CNCS) is an interdisciplinary centre for research in all aspects of the long nineteenth century, from the 1750s to contemporary neo-Victorianism. CNCS is led by academics representing all five of the North East’s universities and from a wide range of disciplines. It always welcomes new members.