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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.

In an article published in Social Semiotics , Professor Angela Smith explores recent developments in masculinity, focusing on the sexualisation of fatherhood in Anglophone media. As it becomes socially acceptable for men to engage with “hands-on” fatherhood roles that had previously been primarily associated with motherhood, the appeal lies not just in this shift in gendered performance, but the representation of this as an opportunity for men to reveal a desirable body image. Where previously the hands-on fatherhood role had been glossed as “nappy changing duties,” this more recent development focuses on men’s bodies and in particular the act of carrying a young child which affords the chance for biceps to be flexed in juxtaposition with the gentle act of holding a child. Colloquially, this has led to the emergence of the “DILF,” particularly on social media where sites are devoted to photos of such men. Smith, A. 2017. Bulging biceps and tender kisses: the sexualisation of fatherho...

Politics senior lecturer Dr Peter Hayes has co-written an article for the journal Child: Care, Health and Development. The authors show how girls adopted internationally from some states have been found to have high rates of early puberty, including early menarche. Explanations for the link between international adoption and early puberty include post-adoption catch-up growth triggering puberty, and under-recorded age. Hayes, P. and Tan, T.X. (2016) Timing of menarche in girls adopted from China: a cohort study . Child: care, health and development. 42(6): 859-862.

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.

Creative writing lecturer Dr Sarah Dobbs has recently published three short stories. 'Burning the Ants' was commissioned for Unthank's collection The End , along with contributors Professor Ailsa Cox and AJ Ashworth, who also attended the Sunderland launch of the collection in the recent Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival . All stories are phrased around images provided by London artist Nicholas Rushton, exploring narrative and emotional responses to the notion of 'the end'. Her other recent short fictions, 'The Imaginary Wife' and 'As Linda was Buying the Flowers' are featured in Unthank's unthology 8 and 9 respectively.

Dr Susan Mandala (Reader in Pragmatic Stylistics, TESOL) has published a chapter in Dialogue across Media , an edited collection published by John Benjamins (Mildorf and Thomas (eds.) 2017). In her chapter 'Pragmatic stylistics and dramatic dialogue', Susan views dramatic dialogue as a form of exchange that can be read on the page just as legitimately as it can be experienced on stage. Employing a pragmatic stylistic analysis linking the text on the page to her interpretation, she offers a re-reading of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter . While for Burton (1980) Ben was 'the dominating and superior interactant,' and Gus 'the dominated and inferior one' (70), Susan argues that it is Gus who can be considered the dominating character and shows in the concluding discussion why this recalibration of power is significant for a wider understanding of the play.

New approaches to storytelling in the digital age is the subject of the next School of Culture research seminar. From poetry on Instagram to Twitter short stories, moving graphic novels on Vine and seeing who reads your guerrilla stories, social media offers new opportunities to get your prose, poetry and other work in front of new readers. This workshop from Iain Rowe (author of One of Us and the director of the creative writing strand of the Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival) will explore the possibilities and get you creating. 10th February 12 noon, Priestman 115 http://www.iainrowan.com/ #! This is a free event open to all, but please email sarah.dobbs@sunderland.ac.uk to register interest.