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At the graduation ceremony on Friday 30th November 2018, Maria Fotiadou will receive her PhD. After achieving a First Class degree in English Language and Literature in the School of Culture in 2014, Maria was awarded a full scholarship by the School which allowed her to pursue research under the supervision of Dr Michael Pearce and Professor Angela Smith . The thesis is a wide-ranging study of the language of careers services as it is represented on UK university websites, with a particular focus on ‘employability’. Combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, Dr Fotiadou’s research reveals the nature of the discourse surrounding this problematic concept, as shown in an extensive and innovative analysis of repeated patterns of collocation and more extended phraseological clusters in a multi-million-word corpus. Her work is beginning to have an impact in the field of critical linguistics, with a double-length article based on her thesis research appearing in...

Rosie Hordon-Clark (who has a BA and MA in English from the School of Culture) has been awarded a funded, 4-year PhD Scholarship from the School of English at Dublin City University , under the supervision of Dr Gearòid O'Flaherty. Rosie will explore the relationship between Angela Carter and feminism: to what extent can Angela Carter be identified as a feminist; what kind of a feminist was Carter; and what areas of her work are at odds with feminist thought? Her research will provide a chronological analysis of a selection of Carter's work, exploring the changes in feminist positions that Carter adopts in response to the ambiguities and complexities of Second-Wave feminism.

PhD student Katie Ward was invited to Longbenton High School to give a talk on gender identity to top set year elevens. The talk explored gender identity and part of Katie's research on Membership Categorisation in Transgender Communities. The students took part in activities which got them to think about their own gender identity as well as the difficulties faced by trans people. Students and staff actively participated throughout and asked some interesting and challenging questions.

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce four recently completed PhDs: Dr Marjan Shokouhi . The Nature/Culture Dichotomy in an Ecocritical Study of W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. (Supervised by Drs  Alison Younger and Angela Smith ) Dr Akram Dik. Revisiting the Concept of Displacement: Representations of Home and Identity in Contemporary English Post-colonial Metropolitan Fiction (1956-1990). (Supervised by Drs  Kath Kerr-Koch and Geoff Nash ) Dr Darren Brooks. Rankin's Scotland: Scottish Crime Fiction and The Narration of Modern Scotland. (Supervised by Dr  Barry Lewis and Peter Dempsey ) Dr Danny Crew. Published Music as Political Research Tool in American Politics. (Supervised by Dr  Kevin Yuill and John Kefala-Kerr )