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  Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in partnership with the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the British Academy, Being Human is a national festival promoting public engagement with humanities research. Between 17 and 23 November 2018 , the School of Culture is hosting a series of public talks looking at this year’s theme of ‘Origins and Endings’ through the lens of Sunderland’s local history. The topics range from the Wearside origins of English republicanism to the end of heavy industry in the city. All are free to attend and open to all. Click on the links to find out about these events. The North East Coast, the Sea and its Dangers (Dr Peter Hayes) A Place Fit for Heroes? The End of the First World War in the North East (Dr André Keil) Suffrage and Beyond in Sunderland: The City’s First Female MP  (Dr Sarah Hellawell)   The Lilburne Family and the Origins of English Republicanism (Dr Delphine Doucet)

We all know that novels are more than just stories; they often tell us about our lives and ourselves. This talk by Guy Mankowski  will consider how writers have taken fiction to its limit by questioning how we live now and how we might live in the future. Guy’s novel How I Left The National Grid examined how, in postmodern culture, subculture and nostalgia offer people some room to shape the world they want to live in. From the future societies described in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the exotic technologies in JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands , this session will also look at how literary fiction has imagined - and proposed - synthetic futures. Dr Guy Mankowski is the author of four novels: Letters from Yelena (Legend Press) was awarded an Arts Council Literature grant, used in GCSE training material by Osiris in 2015, and adapted for the stage. How I Left The National Grid (Zer0 Books) was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing and published in the UK, US and Canada...

Dr Sarah Hellawell will be speaking on the theme of 'Students in the North East of England and the Aftermath of the Great War' at an event held by the North East Labour History Society . She will explore the impact of the First World War on student life in the North-East, shedding light on the student-led initiatives to foster a greater sense of internationalism during the interwar years. This research is part of the ‘ British Ex-Service Students and the Rebuilding of Europe Project, 1918-1922 ′ led by academics at Northumbria, UCL and Sunderland Universities in connection with the National Union of Students and the North-East branch of the Workers’ Educational Association . It has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s WWI Engagement Centre at the University of Hertfordshire.   April 3rd 2018 at 7pm Old George Inn Old George Yard Newcastle, NE1 1EZ

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

Dr Susan Mandala will be giving a talk in the Language Research Seminars series on Tuesday 14th November at 5pm in Reg Vardy 113 . She will explore how forms of mass media and popular culture have long been of interest to analysts for what they potentially tell us about ourselves and frequent attention has been paid to representations of gender, race, class, ethnicity and power. An equally potent but lesser explored representation is that of language learners. How are English language learners portrayed in our popular dramas, sitcoms and soap operas and what makes these portraits significant? Ranging widely over programmes such as The Archers and The Big Bang Theory , this paper explores the representation of English language learners in these texts and investigates how they are ‘storied’ in some of our most popular dramas. Dr Mandala argues that these representations frequently construct language learners as ‘other’ and asks what challenges this may pose for practice, te...

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.

Please come along to the next Languages Research Seminar for a talk by Dr. María Alonso Alonso, award winning fiction author, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her topic is 'Narco-culture and violence in Latin American literature'. Tuesday 7th March at 5pm in DG313.

In the first Humanities Research Seminar of 2016 Professor Angela Smith's topic is banter. It has long been recognized that jocular argument and teasing are central to social bonding.  In Western society, this is most often seen as being a feature of masculine behaviour.  Various studies (eg Gough 2001, Benwell 2006, Smith 2016); have shown that this is a central concern of male bonding, with Mike Souter (the first editor of FHM magazine) commenting that in a social group, the wittiest guy is the most popular.  However, when this is transferred to the domain of broadcast media, it has the capacity to be misinterpreted and have the opposite effect of binding social groups.  The majority of complaints sent to the BBC relate to the ‘offensive’ remarks on programmes such as Top Gear , whilst on Channel 4 the same is the case on programmes in the ‘comedy quiz panel show’ genre.  Most often this is defended as being a ‘misunderstanding’ of an in-show j...

Dr Neil Johnson Dr Neil Johnson (Team Leader for TESOL) will be giving a talk in the Languages Research Seminar series at 5pm on Tuesday November 22nd 2016 (Forster 301).   In the increasingly globalized and digital context of higher education, with concomitant pressure to internationalize through raised proficiency standards and greater intercultural understanding, the dominant skills-based, discreet approach to language teaching may not be optimally effective. In his presentation, entitled "Understanding language and culture through multimodal text analysis", Neil will describe the Literacy-based approach to language education that seeks to address these concerns. This approach was used to re-imagine a course for second year undergraduates at a small private university in Japan, and operationalizes both reading and writing as essentially similar processes of meaning making and design (New London Group, 1996). The course was re-structured so that learners are involved in ite...

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 .

The Department of Culture's new writer-in-residence Rob Young will be giving a talk called 'How to Write a Movie' on Friday 3rd June 2016 ( 1-2pm, Priestman Building 118 ). Rob was born and bred in South Shields. He is an award-winning writer and BAFTA Screenplay Judge. His feature film - Miranda (2002) - won the main prize at London's Raindance Film Festival. Everyone is welcome to this crash-course in screenwriting from a local boy made good!

Dr Mike Pearce has been invited to give a talk at the Centre of Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences at Newcastle University . His topic is the linguistic landscape of North East England. Research on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology has shown that North East English is one of the most widely recognized and positively evaluated varieties in Britain. There is a rich tradition of dialect writing associated with the region, and a long history of both 'folk' and scholarly attention to local forms of language - for example, it is the only part of England to have a major corpus devoted to it: the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English at Newcastle University. However, one element is missing from the otherwise well-charted dialectological terrain: an account of localized forms in the 'linguistic landscape' (that is, the public display and representation of written language on road signs, advertisements, house names, vehicles, and so o...

The History Society is pleased to announce that  Professor Rosalie David (University of Manchester) will be giving a talk on recent research on the topic of pharmacy in Ancient Egypt. The event is free to all and takes place on Wednesday 13th April 5-6.30pm in Priestman 118.

Dr Dale Townshend The next English research seminar features Dr Dale Townshend (University of Stirling) on Wednesday 16th March at 5pm in Priestman 216 . He will be giving a talk on Walpole's  The Castle of Otranto  (1765). Ever since Walpole disclosed the authorship of his ‘Gothic Story’ in the second edition, it has been assumed that the ‘real’ and ‘particular’ castle to which he, in his guise as the ‘translator’ William Marshal, referred in the Preface to the first edition of the novel was Strawberry Hill, the ‘little Gothic castle’ in Twickenham that he had set about ‘Gothicizing’ since the late 1740s. However, according to Dr Townshend this is really only half of the story, for while the castle at Otranto certainly, as Walpole would later phrase it, ‘puts one in mind’ of Strawberry Hill, it also looks to the architectural formations of ‘ancient’ or ‘Gothic’ romance for its structure, its effects, and even its eventual disappearance. More specifically, Manfred’s cast...

Dr Kevin Yuill Dr Kevin Yuill will present the annual Telders Lecture in the Hague on March 15th, 2016. The Telders Foundation is a Dutch think tank for liberalism, affiliated to the VVD party. It annually organizes a lecture in which a prominent academic, journalist or politician presents his or her view on recent events or current debates. The title of the lecture is 'The Implications for a Liberal Society of Legalized Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia'.

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...

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1563 The second talk in the new series of Languages Research Seminars will be given by Dr Susan Mandala on the topic of 'ESL and EFL voices in English literature’. It takes place on Monday 8 th February at 6.00pm in FR 302 (Forster building , City Campus). All welcome!

Fintan O’Higgins has worked as a script and storyline writer for several television soaps and is currently working as a script editor on Channel 4’s Hollyoaks. He will be discussing the particular demands of storytelling for the screen.  Friday 29th January,  Priestman Building 312, City Campus 1-2pm. This event is free. For further information contact Dr Sarah Dobbs (sarah.dobbs@sunderland.ac.uk).

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 .  

British War Widows of World War 1 is the subject of a talk to be given by Dr Angela Smith at the Bowes Museum on 12th January 2016 at 2.30 pm. Booking information can be found here .