mortiz070

  Matthew Thomas, a third year history undergraduate, has received a bursary from the Society for the Study of Labour History , enabling him to visit Norfolk Record Office and collect important documents regarding the Burston School Strike, the longest strike in British history (1914-1939). The findings from this research will be revealed in Matthew's dissertation, a study of the role of school strikes in labour history. The main focus is on the Burston and Washington/Usworth strikes, which were vastly different in their execution, but had similar aims. Matthew's research in Norfolk unearthed some invaluable documents, including a copy of the school log book for the Burston and Shimpling School which describes the conduct of the school and gives details of the attendance rates and disciplinary action under Mrs. Higdon, the headmistress and wife of a Labour activist. This material helped Matthew to provide the necessary context for the dispute between the lo...

Professor Angela Smith has recently given a paper at the 'Approaches to Discourse' conference at Georgetown University (Washington DC). She spoke on the concept of hypermasculinity, which was first theorised in the early 1980s. At that time masculinity was often perceived as being under threat from the great advances in gender equality made following the arrival of Second Wave Feminism.  Angela argued that in the last five years we have seen a rise in the performance of hypermasculinity on the national stage, often aligned with right wing politics and a heightened sense of national identity in face of a perceived over-reaching of liberalism.  Angela's paper explored how some politicians use social media to promote their messages, side-stepping the otherwise regulating voice of the mainstream media. She looked at tweets from the personal account of Donald Trump to offer an explanation for at least part of the appeal of the ‘Make America...

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

A new volume of essays entitled Crisis and the Media  features a chapter by Professor Angela Smith . In it, she explores how rejections of claims for equality are represented in the technology of the twenty-first century, but at the same time embody the language of a pre-feminist world and can thus be seen to at once empower and restrict feminist discourse. In this way, the crisis in gender relations is one that emerges in the 1990s in Westernised contexts and continues to develop into the twenty-first century, contributing to the emergence of a Fourth Wave of feminist action. As such, 'crisis' is employed to explore how various small events, seemingly insignificant in isolation, have been raised to public notice through social media to enhance the emergence of Fourth Wave Feminism in the last ten years. Smith, A. 2018. 'Gender in "crisis", everyday sexism and the Twittersphere.' In Patrona, M. (ed) Crisis and the Media . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.231-260...

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...

Dr Steve Cannon In this Languages and TESOL research seminar, Dr. Steve Cannon (Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, University of Sunderland) will be addressing the topic of awards ceremonies. These events have received little attention from Film Studies academics, most often represented simply by listings of winners in general histories. Quite apart from their marketing role for the industry as a whole, and promoting (and sometimes reviving) particular films, awards ceremonies are also themselves a space for performance and popular entertainment, reflected in their lengthy primetime broadcast slots.   In his paper, entitled 'The Politics of the Awards Ceremony: The ‘Goya’ Awards of the Spanish Film Academy, 2003 and 2004',  Steve will analyse the ways in which ceremonies also offer a space for political statements and mobilisations, echoing and expressing wider social and political struggles but also intervening in them in specific and sometimes organised ways. ...

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).