Research bites
Read about the research activities and achievements of our established and early career researchers.
17 August 2023
Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh from Celtic and Scottish Studies has won funding from the AHRC for his project 'From Lismore To Barbados: The Gaelic Caribbean Travel Journal And Verse Of Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844).'
The project will enable Peadar and his co-investigator Prof Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow) to focus on a travel journal and song-poems written in Scottish Gaelic in the 1810s by Dugald MacNicol, a soldier from Lismore stationed in Barbados. Making MacNicol's Gaelic texts available in a scholarly edition with English translation will add nuance and depth to the understanding of the literary and linguistic history of the Gaelic language, Scottish participation in the British imperial and colonial enterprise, and the nature of 19th-century international trans-Atlantic literary, familial and linguistic networks.
The funding from AHRC will allow Peadar and Nigel to devote time to edit Dugald MacNicol's writing to modern standards, organise two conferences (in Lismore and Barbados), and co-develop a television documentary.
Find out more about Peadar's research on his Research Profile
10 August 2023
Ian Campbell, Emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature, worked as part of the editing team on 'The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle' since 1964 and worked through to the completion of the recently released final volume of this long running project.
The concluding volume of 'The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle' has now been published. Volume 50 encompasses the period from December 1875 to February 1881, spanning the years following Jane’s passing and concluding with Thomas Carlyle’s death. In its pages, readers will discover 80 letters dictated by Thomas Carlyle, and another 23 written by his niece Mary Aitken Carlyle and nephew Alexander Carlyle, including a poignant final letter composed by the latter, detailing the events surrounding Thomas Carlyle’s death and funeral.
Beginning with the first four volumes, published in 1970, this extraordinary collection has provided a captivating glimpse into the lives of Thomas Carlyle, the renowned Scottish writer and historian, and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, one of history’s great letter writers. Their home became a hub for a diverse circle of intellectuals, including radicals, revolutionaries, feminists, and writers from both sides of the Atlantic. The series of volumes has since been hailed as one of the most comprehensive and remarkable literary archives of the nineteenth century.
Find out more about the Carlyle Letters on their online resource page
12 July 2023
Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh from Celtic and Scottish Studies secured an award from the Edinburgh - Copenhagen Strategic Partnership Seed fund.
Peadar and his research collaborator from the University of Copenhagen are planning a series of workshops to open up the archives held in Edinburgh and Copenhagen of eighteenth-century correspondence once belonging to the Danish-Icelandic scholar Grímur Thorkelin (1752–1829), secretary of the Arnamagnæan Commission, Keeper of the Danish Royal Archive and “professor extraordinary” at the University of Copenhagen.
The project reassesses Grímur Thorkelin’s work within the context of late 18th-century septentrionalism – interest in things Northern – with particular focus on his extensive scholarly network connecting Scandinavia and Scotland.
Find out more about Peadar's research on his Research Profile
6 July 2023
Jenny Watson (DELC - German) has been awarded an RSE Workshop Grant for her project Uneven Ground: Literary Representations of the “Holocaust by Bullets”.
The so-called “Holocaust by bullets” has occupied a marginal position in memory literature, often emerging only via allusion and metaphor. This workshop will examine whether this is changing, particularly over the last two decades, and will discuss why literary representations of this facet of the Nazi genocide remain so scarce. This will be the first meeting of literary scholars working on this topic, which so far has been addressed primarily with respect to museums, memorials and formal commemorative practices.
The funding from the RSE will allow Jenny to host a workshop and a symposium in the UK, bringing together researchers at various career stages. As well as the workshop and symposium events, the project outputs will also include two book proposals, a public webinar series, public lectures and author events, and discussions during the project will facilitate the development of larger funding applications, for the project’s next steps.
Find out more about Jenny's research on her Research Profile
6 July 2023
Xuelei Huang has secured funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her project 'The Smell of Scotland: History, Heritage, and Practice.' Xuelei and her collaborator William Tullett (University of York) argue that scents are an essential component of Scotland’s culture and economy. Unveiling, preserving, and making use of this heritage is therefore imperative. From the sweet scents of yellow gorse to the exquisite aromas of whisky, from the pungent stench of the medieval Old Town of Edinburgh to the industrial smells of Glasgow, the smellscapes of Scotland are rich and diverse.
Bringing together academics, perfumers, heritage experts, tourism officers, artists, and the general public, 'The Smell of Scotland' charts the ways in which Scottish smells are entangled with history, identity making, and biodiversity. Focusing on smellscapes and environments, food culture, and animals and botanical species, Xuelei and William will organise workshops and smell-walks in order to produce a journal special issue, a report to relevant stakeholders on smell’s heritage and cultural values, and further grant applications.
Find out more about Xuelei's research on her Research Profile
15 June 2023
We are excited to share that a LLC-PPLS collaboration has won funding from the Carnegie Trust to conduct a multidisciplinary examination of the effect of reading tasks on poetic language processing.
The project brings together researchers from LLC (Dr Patrick Errington, English Literature) and PPLS (Dr Dan Mirman) to explore questions such as: Can changing what we read a poem *for* change how we understand and experience that poem? Might doing so make reading poetry more pleasurable and, as a result, more readily practiced? And would reading more poetry improve our mental wellbeing and make society more empathetic and creative?
Having collaborated on previous projects funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project team joins Patrick's ongoing research in reader response theory and creative practice with Dan's expertise in experimental psychology, neuroscience, and cutting-edge empirical techniques. Together, they will design and conduct a complex series of interdisciplinary experiments that will begin to specify what effects reading tasks have on reading experience. They aim to use their findings to reshape the field of literary study and the teaching of literature worldwide all the while significantly advancing the neuroscientific and psychological understanding of language processing and translating findings into high-impact mental health interventions.
Find out more about Patrick's research on his Research Profile
13 June 2023
The European Ethnological Research Centre (EERC) is a research centre within Celtic & Scottish Studies, whose primary concern is the promotion of research into everyday life and society in Scotland and the publication of research results. The EERC has recently received further funding to continue its work on Scotland's tangible and intangible heritage.
The EERC was founded in 1989 by Prof Alexander Fenton (chair in Scottish Ethnology and Director of the School of Scottish Studies between 1990-1994) and initially based at the National Museum of Scotland before it moved to the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies in 2006.
EERC's flagship project is the 'Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project' (RESP), which began in 2012 and entails significant fieldwork and public engagement. The EERC also participates in a wide range of collaborations in the area of oral history (with archives, libraries and museums, companies and organisations, schools and a prison) and maintains a programme of outreach and knowledge exchange.
Find out more about the European Ethnological Research Centre
8 June 2023
Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce has been awarded further funding from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for the project 'Masks and Screens', which forms part of the research partnership in Intermediality Studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University, Tokyo.
The partnership between Universities of Meiji and Edinburgh is the first collaborative project between Japan and the UK in the field of intermedia studies. It was launched in autumn 2021 and its inaugural workshop took place in Edinburgh in spring 2022.
The planned conference 'Masks and Screens' is the fourth event of the research partnership between Meiji and Edinburgh and will investigate the intermedial nature of early modern, modern and contemporary literary and theatrical forms in Japan and the West from a comparative perspective. Scholars from Meiji and Edinburgh will reflect on the similarities and differences in the uses of masks and screens in these two cultural areas, by highlighting their main characteristics, interactions and mutual influences. The conference will spur discussions between researchers and practitioners who will explore the dialogue between Japanese and British uses of screens and masks, examining themes of display, disguise and mediation to create artworks, texts and performances.
Find out more about Fabien's research on his Research Profile
3 May 2023
Prof. Will Lamb and Dr Beatrice Alex have been awarded funding by the Scottish Government to produce a Gaelic subtitling system suitable for the BBC. Funding will enable the team to start working towards production of a large language model – similar to ChatGPT – for Scottish Gaelic speakers. Efforts to create the system are part of a wider initiative to counter the threat of digital extinction, faced by Scottish Gaelic and other minority languages.
Researchers will assemble a large body of Gaelic language data and use it to generate a high-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for media, education and research. The project will provide desperately-needed Gaelic subtitling technology and catalyse the development of state-of-the-art Gaelic language technology into the future. This will help safeguard the language in digital domains and contribute substantially to national revitalisation efforts.
The project is being carried out in collaboration with the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, BBC Alba, the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic, the historical dictionary Faclair na Gàidhlig, Gaelic media service MG ALBA ,and Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches – a unique online record of Scotland’s rich oral heritage.
Find out more about Prof. Lamb and Dr Alex's project
6 April 2023
Eleoma Bodammer, Reader in German Studies, has won Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship funding for her project E. T. A. Hoffmann and Disability.
Eleoma’s project will examine a selection of works by the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann through the lens of literary disability studies and propose that Hoffmann connects diverse physical, cognitive and sensory disabilities to innovation in creativity and challenges the hegemony of normativity. She will advance her argument that to understand the cultural and literary origins of the idea of disability fully, we need to consider narratives written before disability became a collective term and identity marker in the 20th century.
This two-year Fellowship award will support teaching relief to provide time for Eleoma to work on the monograph, conduct archival research in Germany, and travel to conferences to disseminate the project findings.
Find out more about Eleoma's research on her Research Profile
23 March 2023
Prof. Federica Pedriali has won a Research Associateship from the Modern Humanities Research Associateship. This funding will support the completion of the Edinburgh Gadda Encyclopaedia.
The Encyclopaedia has been 20 years in the making as part of the Edinburgh Gadda Projects (formerly The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies). Highly distinctive in his experimentalism but sitting right at the core of the European literary tradition, Italian philosopher and modernist novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) is an exceptional object of study. Language, in Gadda's case, is the tool to break down reality - not to deconstruct it, but to capture its energetic potential, its granular, molecular force.
The Encyclopaedia engages with this defiant translingualism, with contributions from top international Gadda scholars, senior editors of the major Gadda editions, established translators, and many emerging early career scholars. The printed encyclopaedia will be a landmark publication in two large volumes, and will work in sync with the two editions of Gadda's complete works.
The MHRA Research Associateship will enable Federica to recruit a Research Associate for twelve months to complete the editorial work necessary to prepare the Encyclopaedia for publication.
Find out more about Federica's research on her Research Profile
Find out more about Edinburgh Gadda Projects
23 March 2023
Jean Duffy, Emeritus Professor of French, has won British Academy funding for the project Out of Line: Text, Image and Voice in Jean Dubuffet's Creative Writings.
Jean’s project will run from May 2023 through to the end of 2024, during which time Jean will undertake a series of research trips in France and Switzerland to examine limited edition volumes and unpublished extracts of Dubuffet’s writings.
The resulting monograph, which will be the first extended critical study devoted to Dubuffet’s creative writings, will reveal the thematic richness and formal and linguistic sophistication of these little-known works and will situate them within both the history of twentieth-century visual‒verbal enquiry and the evolution of Dubuffet’s art practice and aesthetic thinking. By identifying thematic patterns running across Dubuffet’s writings and artworks, and by deciphering the quasi-phonetic and invented-language 'textes en jargon', Out of Line will significantly increase the accessibility and audience of this diverse corpus.
Find out more about Jean's research on her Research Profile
23 March 2023
Marie Allitt from our English Literature subject area has won British Academy funding for the project Fatigue in Modernist Imaginations.
Combining a literary-critical lens with disability studies and medical humanities, this project aims to improve the visibility and understanding of chronic illnesses by identifying the language and meanings around fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to discussions of war and trauma in this period, which have so far shaped the discourse around pain and fatigue by focusing on psychic distress and inarticulacy, Marie’s project will give greater attention to physical experiences of fatigue and the contemporaneous imperatives for productivity and efficiency.
Marie’s small grant award will support several archival research trips in the UK and the US, which will inform her planned monograph (provisionally sharing the project’s title), as well as attendance at conferences to disseminate her research.
Find out more about Marie's research on her Research Profile
10 March 2023
Lori Watson from Celtic and Scottish Studies has been awarded an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, for phase one of the project The New Traditional School in Scotland.
Since the 1990s, there has been a significant increase in the creation of larger-scale, innovative compositions by traditional musicians in Scotland. The composers of these works experiment with forms beyond the typical 32 bar dance tune, draw on a wide range of influences, and engage in opportunity-based professional development in this unique community of practice, described as The New Traditional School (Watson, 2013).
This phase of the project follows on from a pilot study supported by a Small Research Grant awarded to Lori by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In this phase Lori will explore the creative practices of composing traditional music in Scotland, document examples of creative process and develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between tradition and creativity, through the development of a new body of innovative artistic work and the first national collection and analysis of existing works from key composers.
Find out more about Lori's research on her Research Profile
9 March 2023
Charlotte Gleghorn from Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, for her project Indigenous Cinematics: Authorship, Authority and the Law in Native Latin America.
During this one-year Fellowship, Charlotte will examine how Indigenous filmmakers and their collaborators are reshaping filmic authorship and authority. The first transnational study of authorship in Indigenous Latin American film, the resulting monograph will make a timely and ground-breaking contribution to contemporary debates regarding the global politics of film recognition, representation and redress, illuminating broader questions pertaining to authorship and cultural property more generally.
This project builds upon Charlotte's longstanding engagement with Indigenous and Afrodescendant film authorship and authority; she has already collaborated with key filmmakers and allied collaborators of the continental umbrella movement of Indigenous Latin American film and media. The monograph project emerged from research undertaken on Charlotte's AHRC-funded Leadership Fellows project The Politics of Authorship in Latin American Indigenous Filmmaking.
The British Academy award will support Charlotte's time to complete the monograph project. The Fellowship will also support Charlotte to undertake interviews with filmmakers and leading scholars in Indigenous Law; to develop a podcast series addressing some of the key issues raised in the monograph, and to attend conferences to disseminate the research arising from the project.
Find out more about Charlotte's research on her Research Profile
23 November 2022
Nicola Frith, Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, has secured an award from the latest round of the CAHSS Knowledge Exchange and Impact Grant. Set in Benin and Ghana in West Africa, this video-documentary project explores the ways that African indigenous communities are opening up ‘a door of return’ to African-descended people whose ancestors were deported and enslaved. Through interviews with cultural and spiritual leaders, traditional kings and chiefs, and returnees from the African diaspora, the project team will explore the themes of loss and cultural and spiritual reconnection – or rematriation – to the African motherland as a vital part of a holistic approach to reparation.
The production of this documentary-film is linked to ongoing research relating to reparations for African enslavement, which has been funded by two AHRC awards, both with Nicola as PI and Joyce Hope Scott (Boston University) as Co-I. The film is being produced by Ghanaian film maker Dan Okeyere Owusu, in collaboration with Nicola, Joyce, and a Benin-based film committee.
CAHSS KE and Impact Grant funding will support the costs of the film's launch in Benin in spring 2023, as well as the costs of attendance for Dan, Nicola and Joyce to present the film and facilitate a post-launch discussion. The event will also provide the opportunity for the team to present educational materials that have been developed as part of the project, and to gain valuable feedback to help with the film’s promotion going forward.
Find out more about Lori's research on her Research Profile
17 November 2022
Since the 1990s, there has been a significant increase in the creation of larger-scale, innovative compositions by traditional musicians in Scotland. The composers of these works experiment with forms beyond the typical 32 bar dance tune, draw on a wide range of influences, and engage in opportunity-based professional development in this unique community of practice, described as The New Traditional School (Watson, 2013).
Dr Lori Watson, a musician, composer, and Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology at the University of Edinburgh was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Small Research Grant to take forward a pilot study: The New Traditional School in Scotland, in which she documented and analysed the ways that traditional musicians are using experimental approaches to make and perform, pieces of music that go beyond the sounds that we would associate with local traditional music in Scotland.
Find out more about Lori's research on her Research Profile
9 November 2022
Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Translation Studies) is collaborating with Jenny Patterson (Midwifery Lecturer, Edinburgh Napier University) on a project supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop Grant. It examines informed consent during pregnancy, labour, and birth in the case of parents with limited English-proficiency (LEP) in Scotland and for whom interpreting services might be needed. It is often difficult for LEP parents to access adequate information in their own languages during perinatal care and this greatly contributes to poor maternal health outcomes.
The main objective of the project is to understand informed consent from an interdisciplinary perspective of midwifery and translation & interpreting studies. Şebnem and Jenny have run a series of expert focus groups and interactive workshops with researchers and practitioners, which allowed them to create an environment where the concept of informed consent in multilingual and multicultural settings in Scottish maternity services could be viewed through fresh eyes.
Find out more about Şebnem's research on her Research Profile
20 October 2022
Inspired by conversations with care experienced individuals and sector professionals, Holding / Holding On, written by Nicola McCartney, Reader in Writing for Theatre and Performance, interrogates the way society treats those in Scotland’s care system.
Following a call-out process in 2020, National Theatre of Scotland commissioned two artists, to undertake a six-month project to investigate the impact that the arts can make within a care context across Scotland, the outcomes of which form Care in Contemporary Scotland, A Creative Enquiry.
As part of the project Nicola McCartney engaged with care experienced adults and young people, community collaborators and sector professionals resulting in a filmed reading of a work in progress script, Holding / Holding On, which explores and gives voice to authentic narratives around Scotland’s care system. Lucy Gaizely/ 21Common worked with learning-disabled adults to create a new experimental documentary, Non Optimum: When It's Safe To Do So addressing personal experiences of care and access to services during the pandemic.
Find out more about Nicola's research on her Research Profile
31 August 2022
Rebecca Macklin, English Literature, has won British Academy funding to host a two-day international conference, 'Resisting Toxic Climates: Gender, colonialism, and environment'.
Whether it’s the spectacular event of an oil spill or the virtually imperceptible pollution of micro-plastics, toxicity is central to the current environmental crisis. To exist in the world means being vulnerable to multiple forms of toxicity. Yet conditions of vulnerability are unequal, shaped by a range of social, biological and geographic factors. Placing emphasis on the gendered forms of toxicity produced through colonialism, this conference will examine how historical and contemporary global structures of conquest produce toxic conditions that disproportionately flow along gendered lines.
At this critical moment of planetary crisis, this conference, due to take place at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in summer 2023, will assemble researchers and artists from distinct disciplines and spaces, asking them to produce a new set of methodologies to respond to the emerging forms of toxicity moving through bodies, landscapes and waters. Centring feminist, queer, decolonial and Indigenous research paradigms, this event seeks to foreground frequently side-lined perspectives to develop new strategies to resist toxic climates.
Find out more about Rebecca's research on her Research Profile
11 August 2022
One of 26 projects awarded funding in the CHANSE Call on Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in The Digital Age, Frédéric Volpi's project is a collaboration with researchers in Spain, Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, Coventry and Wales Trinity Saint David.
Digital Islam across Europe: Understanding Muslims’ Participation in Online Islamic Environments investigates the characteristics of contemporary Online Islamic Environments (OIEs), and their consequences for the social and religious practices of different Muslim populations within and across distinct European contexts. Focusing on the interactions between producers and users of OIEs, it examines how, when and why individuals and groups seek advice on the internet about a range of social and religious issues, as well as how their online and offline experiences and practices shape one another. At its core, the project will provide an examination of how diverse Muslim populations engage with the online ecosystem providing formal or informal advice on issues related to Islam. It will show how these interactions shape, and are shaped, by the success of specific online producers. It will also analyse on how these usages of OIE can induce revisions of individual behaviour and belief in different national settings.
This research complements the Digital British Islam project for which Frédéric and his colleagues from University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Coventry University have already received ESRC funding.
Find out more about Frédéric's research on his Research Profile
7 July 2022
Dr Emanuela Patti has received a Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop Award for her project on David Rizzio at the Scottish Court.
Emanuela's project will explore the multifaceted figure of David Rizzio (1533-1566), also known as Davide Riccio, a key Italian figure in Scottish history and culture. In his late twenties, Rizzio came to Scotland as a member of a diplomatic mission from Savoy in 1561, and stayed at the Scottish Court, first as a musician, then as Mary Queen of Scots’ confidante and private secretary. He was murdered at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh by a group of Protestant lords including the Queen's husband, Lord Darnley. As a Catholic with strong relations with Papacy, Rizzio played a significant role in the scenario of religious conflicts which marked the Scottish Reformation. These reasons, together with the close relationship with Mary Queen of Scots, have made him a highly romanticised historical character, represented in the arts (painting, cinema, literature, theatre, music) for centuries.
Emanuela will bring together stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including History, Divinity, History of Art, Italian, Scottish Literature, and Music to provide the first comprehensive account on the life and career of David Rizzio and to disseminate this knowledge through a series of collaborative educational activities across the University of Edinburgh, secondary schools, libraries, and museums.
Find out more about Emanuela's research on her Research Profile
30 June 2022
Dr Annie Webster will be hosted by English Literature as Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow from February 2023. Annie's project, 'Stories of the Syrian New Scots: Resettlement geographies in refugee arts', explores how refugee writing and art illuminate ‘ecologies of displacement’, and will focus on the creative practices of Syrian refugees in Scotland (who have become popularly known as ‘Syrian New Scots’). Annie's research stands at the intersection of Arabic cultural studies, refugee studies, and environmental humanities. This will be the first cultural analysis of storytelling practices in a Syrian-Scottish context. Through this focus, the project will develop a new framework for theorising the located nature of refugee arts which emerge through transcultural interplay with the languages, histories, and geographies of local host communities. Annie will be mentored throughout the Fellowship by Prof. David Farrier.
30 June 2022
The Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies will host Dr Simon Loynes as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from January 2023. Simon's project, 'The Qur'an and Pre-Islamic Poetry: Worldviews negotiated' will offer a comprehensive comparative study and open-access research tool of the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry. Through analysis of key vocabulary, this innovative research programme will demonstrate that a core component of the Qur’an is the way in which it negotiates its theocentric worldview with the essentially heroic and worldly ethos attested in the poetry itself. By establishing that the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry are more closely connected than hitherto thought, the scene is set for a re-evaluation of the very foundations of classical Arabic literary and cultural history. Simon will be mentored throughout the project by Dr Jaakko Hameen-Anttila.
29 July 2022
We are delighted to share that Prof. William Lamb (PI - Celtic and Scottish Studies) and Dr Beatrice Alex (Co-I - English Literature) have won AHRC funding for the project 'Decoding Hidden Heritages in Gaelic Traditional Narrative with Text-Mining and Phylogenetics'.
About to enter its second year, this project combines qualitative analysis with cutting-edge computational methods to decode, interpret and curate the hidden heritages of Gaelic traditional culture. The project team includes Co-Is based at Durham University, Dublin City University, University College Dublin, and Indiana University. The team has partnered with Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches (Scotland’s online resource dedicated to the presentation and promotion of audio recordings of Scotland’s cultural heritage) and the Government of Ireland, to provide the most detailed account to date of the similarities and differences in Scottish and Irish Gaelic narrative traditions.
Through an approach known as text-mining, the project team will use artificial intelligence to search tales for similar topics, phrases and other linguistic patterns. The matches that are found will be correlated with what is known about the texts themselves. Another approach, known as phylogenetic network analysis, will be used to comb relationships between the texts' themes and the people who produced them. The team will combine these two approaches to create a unified account of Scottish and Irish oral narrative, which will transform our understanding about Gaelic oral culture, and will provide unique archival material to a diverse audience.
Find out more about William's research on his Research Profile
Find out more about Beatrce's research on her Research Profile
27 July 2022
Dr Patrick Errington, Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in English Literature, secured an award from the latest round of the Challenge Investment Fund (CIF). The project team have been working throughout this semester, and have just completed the Challenge Investment Funded portion of this project.
Poetry is difficult, full of allusions, figurations, and novel metaphors. But reading poetry is often deeply pleasurable. How is this pleasure related to difficulty? In a preliminary behavioural study, Patrick, alongside PPLS Co-Investigator Dr Dan Mirman, and Research Assistant Melissa Thye, found that in certain cases an optimal degree of linguistic difficulty increased readers’ pleasurable feeling. Literary theorists have suggested that the pleasure experienced in 'optimally difficult' literature is related to an increase in physical sensation.
In this CIF-funded project, the team have extended their behavioural study with neuroimaging to establish a relationship between 'optimal' linguistic difficulty, pleasure, and neural immersiveness or embodiment. Their experiment will provide a basis for an extensive series of studies to further examine how immersion and pleasure are affected by the anticipation of various post-reading tasks, how these affect reading habits, and how reading habits can influence reader well-being.
2 June 2022
Dr Kholoud al-Ajarma, Alwaleed Lecturer in the Globalised Muslim World, has secured an award from the latest round of the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account awards.
The value of water is about much more than its price – water has enormous and complex value and is at the core of sustainable development. Nonetheless, official and academic discourse on water management largely ignores a wealth of traditional knowledge about, and non-economic values attached to, water.
"Valuing Water: Religious, social and cultural perspectives from a water-scarce region" highlights the value of water from perspectives that are often ignored in traditional water management policies in the Mediterranean region. The project aims to encourage a more comprehensive understanding of water's true, multi-dimensional value, using workshops, local and regional meetings, and audio-visual production. The project seeks to increase water awareness to help safeguard this critical resource, and work towards water security and sustainability in the Mediterranean region and beyond.
For this project, Kholoud has partnered with Laje'oon Center, a community-based grassroots creative cultural centre that works with new generations of Palestinians - they will be providing additional support for the project's activities. Throughout 2022, Kholoud will be working alongside a team of local facilitators, filmmakers, musicians, translators and storytellers, to run a series of workshops in the West Bank, and to produce a number of related audio-visual resources. The resources will be shared with the wider community, and the recommendations from the workshops will be disseminated in meetings with government officials and funding agencies, to advocate for community-led development of water management.
19 May 2022
In 2019, the University of Edinburgh Biopolis project invited a selection of prominent writers living in Scotland to engage in conversations with cutting-edge researchers based at the University of Edinburgh in order to create speculative stories about the impact of biotechnology on urban life. The project aimed to expand imaginaries around urban futures by looking at new discoveries of biotechnology, new expressions of biodesign, and new understandings of natural systems, expressed through fiction and artistic means.
In the latest event in the series, Dr Nadanai Laohakunakorn, Chancellor’s Fellow in Biotechnology, and Dr Jane Alexander, creative writing lecturer and writer of speculative fiction, reflected on their Biopolis collaboration, which asked how synthetic biology might affect our built environment. Nadanai described his research into cell-free synthetic biology, framed through the lens of approaching science as a creative enterprise, while Jane addressed how creative writing as research can operate as a means of inquiry that produces interdisciplinary knowledge.
In discussion, they considered some of the questions that emerged from their collaboration: what can science learn from the creative approaches of fiction, and vice versa? What kind of knowledge is produced by such collaborations? What happens when the emotion, empathy and ambiguity that characterise fictional investigations converge with the rational search for unambiguous clarity that characterises scientific research? How can sci-art collaborations go beyond public engagement - how can scientific research benefit from collaboration with imaginative writing?
Find out more about Jane's research on her Research Profile
28 April 2022
Dr Yoko Sturt (Asian Studies) has received funding from the Japan Foundation for the event "Beyond Kanji Teaching: Culture, values and issues in Kanji writing".
Yoko will organise an online conference which will reexamine traditional kanji (Chinese characters) teaching in the framework of experiential learning, from the point of view of non-kanji-background and heritage Japanese learners. The project aims to examine various problems that occur when non-kanji-using learners of Japanese write kanji characters using a pen/biro, explore the points of contact between Japanese language education in Japan and overseas, especially the UK, and examine the visual culture of Japan regarding the art of handwriting, and the related linguistic landscape in everyday life in Japan.
"Beyond Kanji Teaching" will be open to the public, mainly for those involved in Japanese language education and inherited languages, and for inter-sectoral kanji learners from heritage language backgrounds, and in secondary, university, and adult education, followed by a post-conference workshop addressing an under researched topic regarding issues in "left-handed" writers.
Find out more about Yoko's research on her Research Profile
21 April 2022
Dr Katie Pleming (French and Francophone Studies) is part of a consortium that has been awarded funding from the UNA Europa Digitzed! call.
Katie will work with colleagues from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and KU Leuven to create The Digital Public Space Research Network.
Bringing together early career researchers from five UNA Europa institutions, this research network will consider how the digital has transformed and will transform the public space. Developing the idea of a ‘digital public space’, this network will interrogate both the underlying ideas and theories which illuminate current practices on the internet, and the ways in which the Humanities can promote more ethical forms of online engagement and activity.
Find out more about Katie's research on her Research Profile
10 April 2022
The Alexander Nove Prize was established by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) in 1995, and is awarded annually for scholarly work of high quality in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies. The 2020 prize, which was announced in early 2022, was awarded to Prof. Katharine Hodgson (Exeter) and Dr Alexandra Smith (Russian Studies) for their co-authored monograph "Poetic Canons: Cultural memory and Russian national identity after 1991" (Peter Lang, 2020).
Find out more on the BASEES website [external]
Find out more about Alexandra's research on her Research Profile
7 April 2022
Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce (DELC) has been awarded funding from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for the project 'Image, Music, Text', which forms part of the research partnership in Intermediality Studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University, Tokyo.
The partnership, the first collaborative project between Japan and the UK in the field of intermedia studies, was launched in autumn 2021, and the inaugural workshop took place in Edinburgh earlier this month.
Intermediality is a new discipline that investigates the links between media: media combinations (such as computer installations, illuminated manuscripts and opera), medial transposition (such as film adaptations and novelizations), and intermedial references (such as references to a painting in a film). Intermedia analysis enables researchers to explore the connections across different media, engaging with cutting-edge scholarly discussions about the nature of print and digital media, the relationship between texts and images, adaptation, the book as communicative tool, and digitization.
The planned workshops will reshape discussion in intermedia studies by providing an extended reflection on the strategies and scholarly influence of Roland Barthes, with particular focus on the collection of Barthes' key writings, Image, Music, Text. The collaboration will develop some of Barthes’ ideas on the status of intermedia in communication across languages: what happens when intermediality and translation occur at the same time? What can translation and multilingualism show us about medial transposition and media combination and vice versa? How does intermediality relate to multi-modality, language learning and communication?
The GBSF funding will allow four delegates from LLC (Dr Arribert-Narce, Prof. Marion Schmid, Dr Francois Giraud and third-year LLC PhD student Matthis Hervieux) to travel to Tokyo in December 2022 for the second project workshop
Find out more about Fabien's research on his Research Profile
Find out more about Marion's research on her Research Profile
1 April 2022
Four Edinburgh academics have been appointed to the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s College of Experts. The experts are part of a cohort of 49 external experts from across academia and industry who will provide a mechanism for the department to access external expertise and guidance.
Congratulations to Prof. Melissa Terras (English Literature), along with Orian Brook (SPS), Ewa Luger (ECA), and Mark Parsons (CSE).
25 March 2022
The Edinburgh Impact bulletin recently published an interview with Dr Nicola Frith from the French section of the Department of European Languages and Cultures on her work as part of the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations.
Nicola is currently undertaking research activities in Benin and Ghana funded by her AHRC follow on funding award for the project "Rethinking Reparations for African Enslavement as Cultural, Spiritual and Environmental Repair".
Read the full interview on the Edinburgh Impact website
23 March 2022
We are delighted to share that Dr Benjamin Bateman, English Literature, has won British Academy funding for the project "Fictions of Survival: Pandemic literature and our present time".
How can literature written in response to previous pandemics speak to the concerns and contingencies of the present coronavirus pandemic? Living through the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have often found ourselves referring to 'unprecedented times', but does this view run the risk of failing to engage with previous pandemics, the differential threats they posed (and continue to pose) to marginalised and vulnerable populations, and the creative responses they inspired among writers and artists?
With funding from the British Academy, Benjamin will organise a two-day symposium inviting literary scholars to present on a range of topics relating to pandemic literatures. Drawing on theoretical approaches from queer theory, postcolonial theory, and the environmental and medical humanities, the presentations and discussions from the symposium will explore fictional, poetic, creative nonfictional and autobiographical representations of pandemics. Following the symposium, contributors will be invited to shape their presentations into essays, to be featured in a special collection, which will explore literary reactions to previous pandemics and the relevance of those responses to our contemporary moment of quarantines, lockdowns, social distancing, treatment inequity, and emotional overload.
Find out more about Benjamin's research on his Research Profile
17 March 2022
Prof. Frédéric Volpi, Director of the Alwaleed Centre, has received funding with colleagues from University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Coventry University for their project "Digital British Islam: How do Cyber Islamic Environments impact everyday life?"
The Economic and Social Research Council have awarded a grant of £804k (£232k for the Edinburgh part of the project), to provide Frédéric and his colleagues with funding for this three year research project starting in May.
Cyber-Islamic environments’ (CIEs) is an umbrella term, used to describe how different forms of internet media are used within diverse Muslim contexts. The research will map how CIEs are growing and evolving in relation to intergenerational changes within diverse UK Muslim communities. The research team will explore how digital practices are shaping every day, in-person and ‘real’ experiences of Muslim beliefs in Britain. The research will focus on three themes that generate much public debate - religious authority, gender, and political agency. The project will utilise an online archive, a survey, and interviews.
Read more about the project on the UKRI Gateway to Research website
Find out more about Frédéric's research on his Research Profile
8 March 2022
Dr Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies, along with her co-author Katharine Hodgson, is the recipient of The British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Alexander Nove Prize 2020 (awarded in 2022) for their book 'Poetic Canons, Cultural Memory and Russian National Identity after 1991' (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2020). Read more about Alexandra and Katharine's book, described as an original and compelling work which speaks to a wide array of important topics in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, far beyond its principal literary focus, on the BASEES website.
Link to the BASEES Alexander Nove Prize page
Find out more about Alexandra's research on her Research Profile
1 March 2022
Norwegian Literature Abroad (NORLA) named Dr Guy Puzey (DELC - Scandinavian Studies) their Translator of the Month for March 2022.
NORLA works to advance the export of Norwegian literature through active promotion and funding for translation of books from Norway. Each month, they showcase the vital work of translators from the Norwegian language in their 'Translator of the Month' interview series.
You can read the full interview with Guy via the NORLA website, linked in this post.
Read the full interview with Guy via the NORLA website [external]
Find out more about Guy's research on his Research Profile
1 March 2022
The 'Current and Recent Research Projects' page of the LLC website is designed to provide an insight into the varied and exciting research activities taking place throughout the School. Recently, the LLC Research Office has been working with the School's Web and Communications team to update this page, and to make sure we are capturing as many ongoing and recent research activities as we can.
The process of updating the site will continue over the coming months, and you can view all of the projects that have been added to the site so far via the link below:
View Our Current and Recent Research Projects on the LLC Website
24 February 2022
We are excited to share that Dr William Lamb (Celtic and Scottish Studies) has been awarded Scottish Government funding for the project Crowdsourcing the Acquisition of Gaelic Language Speech Technology Training Data.
In recent years, Scottish Gaelic has begun to be represented more and more in several language processing fields and resources, e.g. part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, machine translation (via Google Translate), handwriting recognition and voice synthesis, and in 2021, a team of researchers at UOE developed another key component of modern language technology: an automatic speech recognition system (ASR).
The Gaelic ASR system relies on data-intensive machine learning methods. The tool is created by training a computer algorithm to recognise useful patterns across large stores of textual and audio data. Gaining the data suitable for this kind of aproach is a challenge for most minority languages, due to a sparsity of digitised audio and text. This project seeks to involve the Gaelic community as a key resource for generating and validating training data for the system.
With this most recent funding, William, together with Co-I Dr Peter Bell (School of Informatics) will work with the Centre for Speech Technology Research, and with an external consultant, to build a foundation for crowdsourcing ASR data from Gaelic speakers at large. They will gather and offer access to a series of Gaelic language tools that have been developed by UOE, via a single public-facing website. This site will host the prototype Gaelic ASR tool, along with a prototype text normalisation tool and a multi-functional text analysis tool, along with any other tools developed in the future. The website will also include a means for involving the Gaelic community in correcting the textual output of the ASR tool.
The site will enable anyone with a connected device to access a range of useful Gaelic tools and, by involving the Gaelic-speaking public in the development of the ASR tool, the team will both strengthen the tool's training data, and educate a wider audience about language technology.
Find out more about William's research on his Research Profile
23 February 2022
In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The Ninety-Nine Novels podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
A recent episode saw English Literature's Dr Simon Malpas in conversation with Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation, focusing on Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Listen to the full episode via the link below.
Listen to the Ninety Nine Novels Podcast [external]
Find out more about Simon's research on his Research Profile
21 February 2022
Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage and Director of Research at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, along with colleagues from the School of Law, the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, St Andrews University and consultants The List, has been awarded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the project ‘Towards large-scale Cultural Analytics in the Arts and Humanities’.
This five month project is a pilot study to create a service by which researchers can access recently produced commercial data in order to generate accurate data-led analysis and visualisation of the UK's creative sector. The research will support the development and design of a data repository for the capture and analysis of UK cultural and creative industries data at scale, focusing particularly on events-based data.
Melissa has also been appointed to the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s College of Experts. The experts are part of a cohort of 49 external experts from across academia and industry who will provide a mechanism for the department to access external expertise and guidance.
Find out more about the Edinburgh Futures Institute
Find out more about Melissa's research on her Research Profile
3 February 2022
We are delighted to share that Dr Holly Stephens (Asian Studies) has been awarded an ESRC Fund for International Collaboration UK-South Korea Connections Grant, for her project "Environmental Sustainability and Economic Collaboration in the Longue Durée: A comparative approach to locality, history, and development".
The ESRC UK-South Korea Connections opportunity was commissioned to expand the level of engagement in Social Science and Humanities research between the UK and South Korea. Holly will be leading a network that will bring together researchers based in South Korea and the United Kingdom to compare examples of economic cooperation and environmental resource management in Korea with similar intersections in other parts of the world. The project team also includes Co-Investigators at Durham University and Ewha Womans University, Seoul.
The network is particularly interested in local cooperatives and organizations that historically have been used to manage environmental resources. The network's objective is to situate these cases in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective to better understand how different forms of organization and resource ownership intersect with processes (and possibilities) of sustainability and cooperation. Over the next eighteen months, network activities include an international workshop hosted by LLC on the theme of "Sustainable Resource Management in Comparative and Historical Perspective", and an international conference hosted by Ewha Womans University. Throughout the award, visiting scholars from South Korea will be hosted at LLC and at Durham University.
Find out more about Holly's research on her Research Profile
31 January 2022
Dr Sourit Bhattacharya, Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures, has secured funding for his project ‘The British Empire, Scotland, and Indian Famines: Writings on Food Crisis in Colonial India’.
The main objective of the project is to interrogate administrative, periodical, and cultural representations of colonial Indian famines by Scottish administrators and travellers and Indian cultural critics. Currently we have no existing work bringing together writings on famines to understand how discussions and debates on food crisis in Britain and India have evolved both governmentally and publicly.
Sourit and his collaborators Dr Binayak Bhattacharya (Manipal Academy of Higher Education) and Dr Rajarshi Mitra (Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati) will organise two conferences and two workshops in Edinburgh and Kolkata. The funding will also allow them to put on a specially curated exhibition on famine painting and films, and build a website with annotations of major works as well as a detailed record of the activities and findings of the project, which will be a significant repository for global researchers.
Find out more about Sourit's research on his Research Profile
26 January 2022
An article by Prof. David Farrier (English Literature) has been published on the BBC Future website. The article explores humanity's impact on evolution in animal behaviour, as well as how culture, technology and animal ingenuity have played a part in human evolution.
Read the full article o nthe BBC Future website [external]
Find out more about David's research on his Research Profile
17 January 2022
Dr Charlotte Bosseaux, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, has been awarded an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Research Fellowship for her project on responding to ethical elements of Gender-Based Violence translation.
Exacerbated by factors such as the social effects of COVID-19 and the refugee crisis in Europe, United Nations figures indicate that one in three women will experience Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in their lifetime. This 18-month practice-based project will create two versions of a multilingual documentary that audiences will be asked to assess on the basis of whether the translation techniques used have done justice to survivors' voices. In this way, and through asking interpreters and translators how they feel about their work, the film is underpinned by new research into the ethics of translation.
The project is a collaboration with Saheliya, a Scottish-based charity supporting survivors, filmmaker Ling Lee, and language professionals recruited via specialist company Screen Language. As well as establishing which translation method is best for translating audiovisual personal narratives, it will provide good practice guidelines for translators, translation companies, filmmakers and charities, including on how to work together effectively on sensitive material.
Read our interview with Charlotte about the Gender-Based Violence project
Find out more about the project on its website
10 January 2022
Dr Kim Sherwood, Lecturer in Creative Writing, has been commissioned to write three thrillers, set in the world of James Bond and creating a new generation of Double O agents. With the first book due to be published in September, we excitedly wait to find out what Kim has in store for us!
15 December 2021
Prof. Peter Davies, Professor of Modern German Studies, has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for his project, 'How are Victims' Voices Heard? Interpreting and Translation at a Holocaust Trial'.
The Holocaust is known through translation: survivors' voices have come down to us through translation or in languages other than their first. Particularly raw and difficult is the experience of testifying in court, in the face of the accused and under public scrutiny. 'How are Victims' Voices Heard?' explores the work of translators and interpreters in the trial of 22 former SS Auschwitz personnel in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s. Including the voices of dozens of witnesses, speaking 10 different languages, this event had a profound impact on public understanding of the Holocaust in Germany and beyond.
The research asks vital questions about how victims of genocide can make their voices heard in legal systems. It has the potential to transform the way we understand the legal processes by which perpetrators are brought to justice and the crucial role of translation in defining public perceptions of the survivor experience.
Find out more about Peter's research on his Research Profile
12 December 2021
Dr Hannah Jeffery, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, has won funding from the British Academy for her project 'Say Their Names: The Murals of Black Lives Matter'.
Murals have always lined the streets of Black America, asserting power, presence and solidarity in communities since the 1960s Black Power Movement, but in the age of Black Lives Matter we are seeing something new. In 2009, when Oscar Grant was shot in the back by officer Johannes Mehserle, a host of murals emerged in the streets of Oakland, California where he was killed, ushering in a new age of muralism. When Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman in Sandford, Florida, murals followed suit and sprang up quickly across the country. And a similar mural pattern followed with the murders of Sean Bell, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Aiyana Jones, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray across the U.S. But in 2020, with the locked down eyes of the world watching and listening to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and George Floyd, the emergence of commemorative murals spread exponentially across the world. The words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” were painted onto the roads of every major city in the U.S., and the faces of Arbery, Taylor, Floyd and Elijah McClain lined the streets in every inhabited continent in the world.
In order to preserve this unfolding historic moment in time, when many of these murals are getting defaced and whitewashed, this small grant will allow Hannah to create an online digital archive and curriculum tool that will preserve all known Black Lives Matter murals across the world.
Find out more about Hannah's research on her Research Profile
10 December 2021
We are excited to share that Dr Will Lamb, Senior Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology, and Dr Beatrice Alex, Chancellors Fellow and Turing Fellow, have been awarded funding from Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the principal public body in Scotland for promoting Gaelic development, for the development of an innovative Gaelic text processing tool.
Modern natural language processing technology is usually founded upon AI-based methods, where millions of words are used to ‘teach' computers to accomplish useful tasks. Minority languages often struggle to gain entry to this work due to the paucity of data available for them. Gaelic is in a better situation than some others, but much of the Gaelic text that could be used to train machine learning models is in a pre-standard orthography.
The project team have developed a novel, innovative Gaelic text processing tool, An Gocair (‘The Un-hooker’), which was designed to quickly convert Gaelic text to the Gaelic Orthographic Conventions (GOC 2009). Because this tool marks clearly where spelling mistakes have occurred, it can also assist with teaching Gaelic at all levels, providing first-pass spell-checking and giving people greater confidence in their writing. With additional development, it will also be able to incorporated in a range of downstream computer programs (e.g. a grammar checker).
Currently, An Gocair is a prototype. With this support from Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the team aims to raise the tool's accuracy and to enhance it in several other ways.
Find out more about Will's work on his Research Profile
Find out more about Bea's work on her Research Profile
09 December 2021
In the recent round of awards from UNA Europa, Federica Pedriali, Professor of Literary Metatheory and Modern Italian Studies, will collaborate with colleagues from Bologna, Leuven, and Madrid on two research projects. 'Migration perspectives in Europe: multiplicity and mobility of theatrical cultures', which includes collaborators from Krakow, aims to study the multifaceted perspectives on migrations and their effects on theatrical cultures in different parts of Europe, identifying common trends and best practices of integration, thus offering to policy makers and third sector representatives the opportunity to steer the phenomenon with deeper awareness.
The 'Italian Literature International Observatory' consists of a series of in person and online seminars between senior and junior scholars on relevant topics in contemporary Italian literature.
Find out more about Federica's research on her Research Profile
Dr Hephzibah Israel, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, joins partners from Helsinki, Leuven, Berlin, Bologna, Paris and Madrid for the project 'Toppling Statues: Public Spaces, Colonial Heritage, and Identities in Europe'.
The project seeks to bring colonial heritage to the forefront in the debates of European identity by comparing different national discussions and by critically engaging with the current discourses on the contested meanings underlying European colonial statues that occupy its public spaces, commemorating a history of economic and cultural exploitation across the globe. Using the “toppling” of statues as a starting point, the project examines transnational and transimperial temporal and spatial connections and seeks to uncover colonial heritage as a joint European phenomenon, shared by bigger and smaller states alike.
Find out more about Hephzibah's research on her Research Profile
26 November 2021
The Gaelic Algorithmic Research Group, led by Dr Will Lamb (Celtic and Scottish Studies), and including Dr Beatrice Alex (English Literature), and past and present research assistants, Lucy Evans, Rob Thomas and Michael Bauer, have received a 2021 Gaelic Innovation Award.
The group began work on Gaelic automatic speech recognition (ASR) in September 2020, to raise the status of Scottish Gaelic and facilitate new opportunities for it in an increasingly tech-mediated world. The group has made exciting progress in its first year, culminating in the development of the world's first working Gaelic ASR system in July 2021. The group will soon be embarking on a range of new projects and partnerships.
Find out more about GARG via the project website
25 November 2021
Three colleagues in LLC have been shortlisted for awards at Scotland's National Book Awards 2021.
Prof Wilson McLeod's book 'Gaelic in Scotland' has been shortlisted for Scottish Research Book of the Year 2021. A detailed consideration of the role and place of Gaelic in Scotland from the introduction of state education in 1872 to the present day, it grounds its review of the impact of policy and campaigners on the decline and revitalisation of Gaelic in a vast array of sources which chart the changing fortunes of the language. Wilson's book approaches this story from different perspectives, looking not just at policy but at the legal context, the role of the media and sociolinguistics. It is a substantial but accessible study of the different perspectives on this language.
'The Adventures of China Iron' by Gabriela Cabezon Camara and translated into English by Dr Fiona Mackintosh and Dr Iona Macintyre, is nominated for Scottish Book Cover of the Year.
Read more about the shortlisted books on the Saltire Society Scotland website
04 November 2021
Three of our colleagues have been awarded research grants from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in their recent funding round.
Dr Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Translation Studies) has been awarded a workshop grant for her project 'Translating Informed Consent in Scottish Maternity Services.' This project will see Şebnem working alongside Dr Jenny Patterson, Lecturer in Midwifery at Edinburgh Napier University, and will examine informed consent during pregnancy, labour and birth in the case of parents with limited English-proficiency (LEP) in Scotland (for example, refugees and asylum seekers who have recently arrived at the country).
Şebnem is also one of the facilitators for the Mother Tongue project, hosted by Doulas Without Borders. This project aims to offer culturally appropriate and language-specific doula and peer support to those who do not speak English and are pregnant, birthing or newly mothering. The scheme offers peer support and birth support training, as well as follow-up mentorship, to help build a community of linguistically and culturally knowledgeable doulas.
Find out more about Dr Susam-Saraeva's research on her Research Profile
Find out more about the Mother Tongue project
Dr Jonathan Wild (English Literature) has been awarded small grant funding for his project on a scholarly edition of Conan Doyle's Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories. These stories, originally published alongside the Sherlock Holmes stories between 1894 and 1903, were collected together in two volumes: 'The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard' (1896) and 'The Adventures of Gerard' (1903). While the Brigadier Gerard stories are now overshadowed by Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, during the last century they were extremely popular and considered by their author to be among his best (and probably his favourite) work. The stories focus on the military career of Gerard, a cavalry officer in the Napoleonic wars, and they showcase Conan Doyle’s achievements in historical fiction, characterisation, and perhaps unexpectedly in comic writing. This scholarly edition of the Brigadier Gerard stories has been commissioned by Edinburgh University Press to appear as part of the Edinburgh Editions of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Find out more about Dr Wild's research on his Research Profile
Dr Lori Watson (Celtic and Scottish Studies) has received small grant funding for her project on the New Traditional School in Scotland.
Since the 1990s there has been a significant increase in the creation of larger-scale and innovative composition by traditional musicians in Scotland. The composers of these musical works experiment with forms beyond the common 32 bar dance tune, draw on a wide range of influences and engage in opportunity-based professional development in this unique community of practice: the New Traditional School. Lori's research will provide the first scholarly documentation and analysis of this unique community and its activities.
Find out more about Dr Watson's research on her Research Profile
Find out more about Traditional Music Research on the project website
21 October 2021
Aaron Moore, Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations, has been awarded a Taiwan Fellowship to conduct his research on Chinese visions of the future from 1900 to 1945. He will be hosted by Prof Pan Shaw-yu at National Taiwan University in Summer 2022. This work builds on Aaron's previous research expertise on Japanese and Russian speculative fiction and science writing from the same period. The research in Taiwan will enable him to further integrate Chinese narratives of the future with his existing work on Russia and Japan, which is part of a larger comparative project provisionally entitled 'The Modern Future'.
Find out more about Aaron's research on his Research Profile
21 September 2021
Joachim Gentz, Chair of Chinese Philosophy and Religion, along with Sarah Queen, Professor of History at Connecticut College and Stephen Durrant, Professor Emeritus in Chinese Literature at the University of Oregon, has been awarded funding from the US National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Program for the two-year translation project "Historiography and Hermeneutics in Early China: A Translation of the Gongyang and Guliang Commentaries to Spring and Autumn Annals".
The Gongyang and Guliang commentaries have exerted tremendous influence on Chinese political and intellectual life for two millennia. Instrumental in elevating Confucius to the status of one of the greatest sages of Chinese culture, the texts envision him as author of the Spring and Autumn Annals, bequeathing to future generations this court chronicle containing a hidden and esoteric blueprint for world salvation. The team will produce the first scholarly English translation of the commentaries, side by side with the original and accompanied by rich introductory and explanatory material. This work, expected to be part of the new translation series “Hsu-T’ang Library of Classical Chinese Literature” launched by Oxford University Press, will make the texts readily available for study by early-China scholars, comparatists, political scientists, philosophers and historians.
Find out more about Joachim's research on his Research Profile
30 June 2021
The National Theatre of Scotland has been creatively engaging with the theme of 'Care in Contemporary Scotland' throughout the month of June. This creative enquiry explores themes of care and empathy, and highlights the role that the arts can play in shaping society in Scotland in 2021 and beyond.
One of the digital events taking place as part of this series is Holding/Holding On, written by Nicola McCartney (English Literature), and directed by Claire Lamont. The work, commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland, is inspired by conversations with care experienced individuals, community collaborators and sector professionals, and examines what care really means in contemporary Scotland.
A filmed reading of the work in progress script was launched on 30 June, and will continue to be available via the National Theatre of Scotland website until 21 July.
Find out more on the National Theatre of Scotland website [External]
Find out more about Nicola's research on her Research Profile
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25 June 2021
We are delighted to share that Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) has been awarded Best Essay in Latin American Visual Culture Studies by the Latin American Studies Association, for her essay “The Pixelated Afterlife of Nicolás Guillén Landrián.” The essay explores the Cuban national film archive, with a focus on Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián, and his final and sole audiovisual work, Inside Downtown (2001). Jessica's research investigates how the digital circulation of Guillén Landrián's works creates new social and aesthetic meaning, subjectification, and systems of value.
In autumn 2020, Dr Gordon-Burroughs worked with Dr Raquel Ribeiro (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) to host an online screening of three of Guillén Landrián's films at the 2020 online Havana-Glasgow and Africa in Motion Film Festivals. The screenings were followed by online Q&A sessions with film director (and Guillén Landrián collaborator) Jorge Egusquiza and Cuban film critic Dean Luis Reyes. A video archive of testimonials from Cuban intellectuals, curators and artists on the meaning of Nicolás Guillén Landrián for the Afro-diasporic experience has also been compiled following the screening.
View the full testimonial video on YouTube [External]
Find out more about Dr Gordon-Burroughs' research on her Research Profile
Find out more about Dr Ribeiro's research on her Research Profile
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24 June 2021
In 2018, Edinburgh Futures Institute began work on a film about how the former Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh building was regenerated as an institute for the future. Like its predecessor, the Edinburgh Futures Institute was designed to be open to everyone.
The original plans to launch the film were delayed by Covid restrictions, and the film was first screened live back in spring 2020. Now, AWED, the company behind the film's production, have released a YouTube playlist of highlights from the film. One of the film segments, 'Containment and Contagion: How epidemics shape cultures' focuses on the Plague Dot Text research project, led by Dr Beatrice Alex (English Literature) and Dr Lukas Engelmann (Social and Political Science). The project combined historical data mining with analysis from medical historians to examine how plague outbreaks were reported in major cities around the world during the Third Plague Epidemic (1894-1960). The project was partly supported by the LLC Research Fund, and the College Challenge Investment Fund.
View the full video [External]
Find out more about Dr Alex's work on her Research Profile
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25 June 2021
Dr Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Translation Studies) co-edited the first edition of the Handbook of Translation and Health (Routledge, May 2021), along with former LLC PhD student, Eva Spišiaková.
The handbook covers a broad range of topics, including the history of medicine and translation, the role that translation plays in contemporary medical sciences, and the role of interpreting in modern healthcare settings. Contributions from leading international authorities tackle areas including global epidemics, care in disaster situations, children's healthcare, women's health, maternal health, disability, mental health, queer feminisms, and sexual health.
Dr Susam-Saraeva is currently collaborating with Edinburgh Napier University, on a project focusing on the experiences of Arabic-speaking women who gave birth during the Covid-19 pandemic, where UK lockdown often meant that interpreters could not be present during labour and birth. Through analysis of these women's experiences, the project aims to identify ways to improve the linguistic and cultural support that is offered during perinatal care.
Find out more about Dr Susam-Saraeva's research on her Research Profile
20 June 2021
We are delighted to announce that Dr Rebecca Macklin has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and will be joining us in November.
Dr Macklin will be joining the English Literature department to work on her research project on 'Entwined Futures: Indigineity, Gender and the Extractive Industries'. The project will examine the ways in which cultural engagements with the extractive industries inform our understandings of gendered and racialised forms of violence, producing a new comparative methodology for reading global narratives of extraction in dialogue with one another, and exploring how Indigenous and feminist approaches to human and nonhuman vulnerability and care can produce more equitable energy and resource futures.
Find out more about postdoctoral opportunities within LLC
17 June 2021
The fifth and final event in Edinburgh Futures Institute's 2021 Galvanised seminar series focused on the future of the performing arts and artists post-pandemic.
Live performance exists in the moment and is a reciprocal practice between artists and audiences. This real time connection has been broken over the course of the past year. The reunion of artists and audiences will be a very charged experience; it may take time and will require careful listening. What will our audiences and communities need from artists and arts organisations? Laughter, fun, escapism, and joy? Requiems for those lost and the funerals and wakes that never were? Acts of gratitude for the nurses, delivery people, and scientists who got us through it? Visions of a better world?
Nicola McCartney (English Literature) and Fergus Linehan, Festival Director of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), addressed these questions during the seminar, with reference to the future of internationalism in the performing arts, and whether we are on the cusp of a "Roaring Twenties" as audiences starved of live art flood back to live performances.
Find out more about Nicola's research on her Research Profile
6 May 2021
We are delighted to share that Dr Robert Irvine (English Literature) is Co-Investigator on a project led by the University of Aberdeen to produce the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's poetry.
The University of Aberdeen has been awarded funding via an AHRC standard grant to engage new audiences by publishing five volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry. Dr Irvine will edit the Lord of the Isles edition, working with colleagues from Aberdeen on the other four volumes.
The Edinburgh Edition will return to manuscripts and early editions to provide clean, reliable texts and will provide notes, glossaries and essays to fully support modern readers as they encounter these innovative poems.
Find out more about Dr Irvine's research on his Research Profile
30 April 2021
A special issue of the Journal of Open Humanities Data, published in spring 2021, focuses on Humanities Data in the time of COVID-19, and features an article on the Edinburgh-based Lothian Lockdown project. The project draws on individual accounts of the pandemic, recorded in audio/video diary format, to collect people's experiences during lockdown. The data gathered from the diaries will help inform researchers on a number of topics, including the uptake of public health measures, impacts of the pandemic on mental health, and the drivers of fears, anxieties, rumours and stigma surround COVID-19.
The project team is made up of colleagues from across the University, including PPLS, SPS, MVM, HCA, and LLC's own Beatrice Alex (English Literature).
Find out more about the Lothian Lockdown project via the project website
30 April 2021
Earlier this month, Edinburgh University Press published the first and only anthology dedicated to Frederick Douglass's three journeys to Britain, covering oratory, print and visual culture. The volume is co-edited by one of our current Leverhulme Early Career Fellows, Dr Hannah-Rose Murray (English Literature), and provides both specialist and general audiences with political and cultural insights into Frederick Douglass's transatlantic visits.
Hannah-Rose's current Leverhulme Fellowship draws on the digital humanities project Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland, which maps the speaking locations of African American activists across the British Isles. Find out more, and view the project maps, via the project website, linked in this post.
View the Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland project website [External]
Find out more about Dr Murray's research on her Research Profile
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30 April 2021
This month saw the publication of the latest volume of the Edinburgh German Yearbook. Established, commissioned and edited by colleagues in German at LLC, the EGYB encourages and shares lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies, viewed from all angles but with particular interest in problems arising out of politics and history.
The latest volume, co-edited by Dr Frauke Matthes (German Studies), focuses on Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today. The volume examines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies.
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30 April 2021
LLC research on the Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family has led to the development of an online learning resource on African American revolutionaries, hosted on the National Library of Scotland website.
Struggles for Liberty shares the lifelong fight for social justice of African American freedom fighters campaigning in the United States, Britain and Ireland in the 19th century. The free digital resource has been developed in collaboration with collector Dr Walter O. Evans and academic partners in the US and the UK, and is the latest resource to arise out of the AHRC-funded project Our Bondage and Our Freedom, led by Celeste-Marie Bernier (English Literature). Following four site-specific exhibitions (including one at the National Library of Scotland), an award-winning book, talks, walking tours, and a documentary, this new resource features writings authored by prominent African American authors, orators, philosophers, reformers, freedom-fighters and campaigners.
Find out more about the collaboration via the LLC website
29 April 2021
We are delighted to share that Dr Cordelia Beattie (History, Classics and Archaeology) and Dr Suzanne Trill (English Literature) have been awarded AHRC funding for their project on the autobiographical writings of Alice Thornton (1626-1707).
‘Alice Thornton’s Books: Remembrances of a Woman’s Life in the Seventeenth Century’ is a three year research project to be carried out in partnership with Durham Cathedral, creating a digital edition of the four manuscript volumes and making them accessible to researchers and members of the public.
Find out more about the project on the HCA website
Find out more about Dr Trill's research on her Research Profile
23 April 2021
The Voices in Japanese Studies podcast aims to provide students with inspirational and informative interviews with Japanese Studies academics. The podcasts were created as part of a research project funded by the British Association of Japanese Studies, and led by Dr Chris Perkins (Asian Studies).
The latest episodes of the podcast series have now been released.
Listen to the full series so far on Spotify [External]
Find out more about Dr Perkins' research on his Research Profile
1 April 2021
Novel Dialogues is a podcast that invites a novelist to speak with a literary critic, "to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them."
A recent episode, 'Getting into Other Worlds', saw Professor Penny Fielding (English Literature) in conversation with novelist James Robertson, author of The Testament of Gideon Mack.
Listen to the full episode on Podbay [External]
Find out more about Professor Fielding's research on her Research Profile
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24 February 2021
The Scottish Centre for Korean Studies, funded via a research grant to Dr Youngmi Kim (Asian Studies) from the Academy of Korean Studies, has recently started a blog to engage more widely on Korean policy and culture.
The first two posts feature an opinion piece on how to engage with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and a poem from award-winning poet and writer Young-Mi Choi. More posts are planned and can be found via the link below:
Link to the Edinburgh Forum on Korea Blog
Find out more about Dr Kim's work on her Research Profile
18 February 2021
In the latest round of seed funding awarded by the UNA Europa consortium, an alliance of eight leading European research universities, two of our LLC colleagues are part of research teams awarded funding.
Dr Carlos Soler Montes (DELC) and his partners from Helsinki, Bologna, Berlin, Madrid, Leuven and Frankfurt have received €15,000 to work on postcolonial language studies and sociolinguistics in order to produce new insights into linguistic variation and change in postcolonial contexts, promoting new and long-lasting collaboration initiatives that lead to a better understanding of European languages outside Europe.
The project will put particular focus on lesser studied contact situations and varieties of European languages, such as the varieties of Spanish spoken in Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines, the Portuguese varieties of Angola and Mozambique, Dutch spoken in the Caribbean region and Surinam, and varieties of English from a global perspective.
Find out more about Dr Soler Montes' work on his Research Profile
Professor Greg Walker (English Literature) and his partners from Berlin, Bologna, Helsinki, Krakow, Leuven and Madrid will use the €16,885 awarded to hold two workshops, the first to facilitate discussion on the development of their project on the circulation of narratives in Early-Modern Europe, with the second to discuss partner ideas via working papers and plan the future of the collaboration.
Find out more about Professor Walker's work on his Research Profile
In a previous round of funding, a collaboration including Professor Davide Messina (DELC) and colleagues from Bologna, Berlin, Krakow, Helsinki, Leuven and Madrid was awarded €16,970 to develop their project on Dante and the Multiplicities of Cultures in Medieval Europe.
Find out more about Professor Messina's work on his Research Profile
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31 January 2021
Sir Geoff Palmer, University of Edinburgh alumnus and a respected figure on issues of race and racism, has agreed to chair the University Steering Group looking at contemporary and historic racism. Dr Nicola Frith (DELC) has agreed to co-chair the research and engagement group which will define and lead the areas of inquiry.
Together with others drawn from inside and outside the University, this group will lead a wide consultation and prepare a report for the University Executive, listing reparatory recommendations derived from communities of interest within and beyond our walls.
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21 January 2021
We are delighted to share that Dr Will Lamb (Celtic and Scottish Studies) and Dr Beatrice Alex (English Literature) have won Data Driven Innovation Funding of £50,000 for their project 'Unlocking Gaelic Sound: Increasing digital footfall in Edinburgh's archives through novel language technologies'. The award was one of eight made from the Data Driven Initiative Beacon Build Back Better fund.
The project has received funding to automatically transcribe a broad range of Gaelic-language media, making collections more digitally accessible. It is part of an iterative research programme devoted to developing language technology tools for Scottish Gaelic.
Find out more about Dr Lamb's work on his Research Profile
Find out more about Dr Alex's work on her Research Profile
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7 January 2021
We are delighted to announce that the Royal Society of Edinburgh have awarded a research workshop grant of £8,350 to Dr Patricia Malone and Dr Sarah Bernstein (English Literature) for their project ‘Bibliotherapy and Social Isolation’.
The funds will allow for the organisation of workshops (in person or online) to assist in creating learning materials to support their model of bibliotherapy, to be used by practitioners and other stakeholders to implement a new practice that offers relief and support to those suffering distress in a non-clinical context.
Find out more about Dr Malone's work on her Research Profile
Find out more about Dr Bernstein's work on her Research Profile
15 December 2020
We are delighted to share details of a major NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) funding award made to a team of researchers including Dr Charlotte Gleghorn and Dr Raquel Ribeiro (DELC).
The project involves a team of approximately 40 researchers and partners from Science and Humanities backgrounds in Guatemala and the UK, and has been awarded £3.75M to conduct research on risk and resilience in Guatemala's volcanic cordillera.
Building on the experience of their earlier collaborations, ‘Ixchel’, led by PI Dr Eliza Calder and Co-I Professor Julie Cupples in Geosciences, with Charlotte and Raquel as named Investigators, proposes as its capstone output a docunovela for television, drawing on the testimonies of Indigenous Guatemalans who lived first-hand the recent eruption of Fuego volcano (2018), among other volcanic disasters.
Using interdisciplinary expertise and structures of community governance, Ixchel has the power to transform research methods, and the ways in which Indigenous knowledges, languages and expressive forms can influence the communication of risk and responses to disaster.
Find out more about Dr Gelghorn's work on her Research Profile
Find out more about Dr Ribeiro's work on her Research Profile
15 December 2020
Earlier this month, Celtic and Scottish Studies' Dr Lori Watson, Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology, paid a socially distanced visit to St Cecilia's Hall, where she explored their collection of fiddles, and played a series of tunes to demonsrate how each sound.
The instruments include a mute violin, a Stroh violin, and a fiddle formerly owned by Scottish fiddle-composer William Marshall.
Link to view the full playlist
Find out more about Dr Watson's work on her Research Profile
15 December 2020
In March 2020, Dr Leanne Dawson (DELC/Film) conceived of and launched the first call for responses to Covid-19 in the Arts and Humanities, with the aim of foregrounding lesser-heard voices, and raising money for those in need.
‘Crisis – Connection – Culture: Alternative Responses to Covid-19’, the resulting special issue of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, edited with support from the Mai collective, features accessible academic articles, manifestos, film, and other creative practice by people who are working class, queer, with disabilities, and/or BIPOC, from both within and beyond the academy.
Link to the full special issue
Find out more about Dr Dawson's work on her Research Profile
15 December 2020
We were delighted to see that Professor David Farrier (English Literature)'s book Footprints, released in March 2020, was featured in multiple 'best of' listings.
As well as appearing in The Telegraph's 50 Best Books of 2020, Footprints was highlighted in their best 'smart thinking' books of the year. The Times also included the book, which explores the traces that we will leave for the distant future, in their list of 'Best Philosophy and Ideas Books' of 2020.
Find out more about Professor Farrier's work on his Research Profile
6 December 2020
In November 2020, Piacador published Dr Alan Gillis (English Literature)'s latest poetry collection, The Readiness. One of the poems in the collection, 'Magus', has been featured as The Guardian's 'poem of the month' for December 2020.
Publication in the USA with Wake Forest University Press is following in February 2021.
Link to read 'Magus' via the Guardian website
Find out more about Dr Gillis's work on his Research Profile
30 November 2020
Quiet Woman, Stay, a collection of poems written by English Literature's Dr Jane McKie, was published earlier this autumn by Cinnamon Press:
"Jane Mckie's deeply reflective voice and acuity combine to give us spare, elegant and poised pieces that see beneath the surface of things and people to reveal the intricacies of relationships and the surprising combinations of fragility and strength that weave through life. There is a sense of awe in these poems, not awe of the remote, but of life in all its surprising epiphanies."
Find out more about Dr McKie's work on her Research Profile
30 November 2020
Earlier this year, English Literature's Professor Greg Walker was one of the 'talking heads' in a three-part Channel 5 history documentary, 'Henry VIII', featuring in episodes two and three discussing the years of Henry's break with Rome and his decline into tyranny, drawing on ideas explored in his book, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (OUP) and an article in The Historical Journal on the last days of Anne Boleyn.
The episodes can be viewed on the Channel 5 website
Find out more about Professor Walker's work on his Research Profile
26 November 2020
We are delighted to share that DELC's Dr Nicola Frith has been awarded £100,000 from the AHRC for her project 'Rethinking Reparations for African Enslavement as Cultural, Spiritual and Environmental Repair'.
This award will enable Nicki to continue her work with the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) to conduct a series of interconnected activities in Benin and Ghana that are linked to the broad theme of reparations for African enslavement.
The project team will make a film in Benin about ‘rematriation’, or the cultural and spiritual return of Africans living in the diaspora to the African continent. They will also conduct a series of workshops in Ghana under the leadership of the Ghanaian paramount chiefs about policy-making linked to rematriation processes and on training youth participants on film-making to promote African-centred responses to the climate emergency.
Find out more about Dr Frith's work on her Research Profile
15 November 2020
We are delighted to share that in October 2020, The Saltire Society announced that Professor Wilson McLeod (Celtic and Scottish Studies) was one of the winners of this year's Fletcher of Saltoun Award, for Contribution to Public Life. Sarah Mason, Director of the Saltire Society, writes, "Wilson McLeod's tireless work to ensure that Gaeic not only receives the recognition it deserves but thrives in Scotland's culture makes him a rightful recipient of the Fletcher of Saltoun award."
Find out more about Professor McLeod's work on his Research Profile
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15 November 2020
As with so many events in 2020, this year's Portobello Book Festival took place entirely online. English Literature's Professor Tom Mole was one of this year's speakers, appearing in conversation with Paul Hudson of Portobello Library about his recent publication The Secret Life of Books.
Link to the interview on YouTube
The Secret Life of Books paperback version was released at the end of October.
Find out more about Professor Mole's work on his Research Profile
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15 November 2020
Last month saw the publication by Facet Publishing of Electronic Legal Deposit, a volume co-edited by Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage and affiliated to English Literature for her research.
Legal deposit libraries are now expanding their collection practices to include digital materials. This edited collection brings together international authorities to explore the social, institutional and user impacts of electronic legal deposit, both on the 21st Century library, and on its present and future users.
Find out more about Professor Terras's work on her Research Profile
14 October 2020
'Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter', a book arising from the 2017 international conference on Narratives of The Therapeutic Encounter, has been published by Cambridge Scholars.
Edited by Dr Susan Bainbrigge (French and Francophone Studies), together with Maren Scheurer, the collection of essays explores the ways in which talking therapies have been depicted in twentieth century and contemporary narratives in French. The volume also features a chapter by Dr Katharine Swarbrick (French and Francophone Studies), 'Encounters with the Therapeutic Narrative'.
Find out more about Dr Bainbrigge's work on her Research Profile
Find out more about Dr Swarbrick's work on her Research Profile
14 October 2020
Professor Jaakko Hameen-Anttila (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) has been awarded the World Award for Book of the Year in Iranian Studies for his monograph 'Khwadaynamag the Middle Persian Books of Kings', published in 2018.
Each year, books published in various languages are evaluated, with the winning books and their authors, editors and translators celebrated "for elevating the general knowledge and culture, and developing public scholarship/readership with the Islamic and Iranian written heritage."
This year's award evaluated more than 2300 books in different fields of Islamic and Iranian Studies, with six titles reaching the final award stage.
Read more about Professor Hameen-Anttila's work on his Research Profile
14 October 2020
September 2020 saw the publication of 'Advocates of Freedom', a monograph authored by one of our current Leverhulme Early Career Fellows, Dr Hannah-Rose Murray (English Literature). The volume explores the radical translatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. The monograph uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism has on British society.
Find out more about Dr Murray's work on her Research Profile
14 October 2020
Dr Eleoma Bodammer (German Studies) has been announced as one of two winners of the Pen Cymru Translation Challenge 2020. This year's challenge was to translate a series of short poems, titled 'Nahaufnahmen', by Turkish poet Zafer Şenocak, from German.
Karen Leeder, adjudicator for the Challenge, said that Eleoma's translation, "stood out at once, following the sinuous language to perfection and entirely in tune with that spare voice."
Read more about Dr Bodammer's work on her Research Profile
14 October 2020
Earlier this year, Routledge published an anthology of essays by Dr Sarah Carpenter (English Literature). The essays have been selected to reflect Sarah's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience:
"They are drawn from the last 25 years of her [Sarah's] writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public ‘performances’ of natural and maintained fools. . . Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change."
Read more about Dr Carpenter's work on her Research Profile
8 October 2020
We are delighted to announce that Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage and affiliated to English Literature for her research, is part of the Transkribus project team, one of five recipients of the Horizon Impact Award 2020. These awards are made by the European Commission to recognise and celebrate outstanding projects, funded by EC programmes, which have used their results to provide value for society.
Transkribus uses artificial intelligence (AI) to access and analyse historical documents and archives, as a result contributing to the preservation of European heritage. Transkribus technology merges the humanities with AI to pioneer a platform that enables immediate translation of historical handwritten documents. The National Archives of Finland, Italy and the Netherlands have now started to integrate it into their daily services.
Find out more about Transkribus on the project website
Read more about Professor Terras's work on her Research Profile
31 August 2020
We are delighted to share the fantastic news that Dr Marie Legendre (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council worth £1.2M. Marie will put together a research team including two Postdoctoral Research Fellows and a PhD student to undertake a five year project on Abbasid Fiscal Practice in Islamic Late Antiquity.
Marie’s project offers an ambitious new account of a seminal period in Islamic history. It will for the first time provide a view from below on Abbasid fiscal history through a study of papyrus documents in Greek, Coptic and Arabic written in Egypt.
Read more about Dr Legendre's work on her Research Profile
31 August 2020
Over summer 2020, Dr Christopher Rosenmeier (Asian Studies) has been inviting scholars in Chinese literature studies to contribute 15-minute video lectures on a range of topics covering modern Chinese literature from the late 19th century to the present. The result will be a library of videos that teachers can download for their mixed or online Chinese literature courses. Christopher's own lecture in the series will be linked to his 2017 monograph 'On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s'.
Read more about Dr Rosenmeier's work on his Research Profile
31 August 2020
'Plague Clothes' is the latest poetry collection by Dr Alan Jamieson (English Literature), focusing on life under the shadow of Covid-19 and lockdown. The collection, which was published in early August, provides an "intimate and immediate account of our experience of the pandemic."
Taproot Press, who are publishing the collection, is a new Edinburgh-based publishing house, started by two LLC alumni. They are looking to publish challenging, contemporary literature from Scotland and around the world.
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22 July 2020
Two colleagues from within the Department of European Languages and Cultures have been involved in this year's R. Gapper Book Prize-winning titles. This award commends books of critical and scholarly distinction in the field of French Studies, which have a clear impact on the wider critical debate.
The two books jointly awarded 'Best Book in French Studies' were 'The Music in Dada: A Lesson for Intermediality in Our Times' by Professor Peter Dayan, and 'The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History', co-authored by Dr Gesine Argent. Dr Argent's co-authored book was also recently announced as the winner of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association's Marc Raeff Book Prize 2019.
Read more about Dr Argent's work on her Research Profile
Read more about Professor Dayan's work on his Research Profile
7 July 2020
LLC is delighted to announce that two Leverhulme Early Career Fellows will be joining us in September.
Dr Hannah Jeffery will be joining the English Literature department to work on her research project on interior mural art of the Black Freedom Movement.
Dr Isabel Seguí will be joining the Department of European Languages and Cultures, and will be based in SPLAS. She will be researching women’s nonfiction filmmaking in Peru from 1970 – 2020.
Find out more about postdoctoral opportunities within LLC
2 July 2020
Dr Alan Macniven, Scandinavian Studies, has been working on the Islay Life Explorer project for a number of years, with the aim of creating an accessible digital portal to the place-names, family histories and cultural heritage of the Inner Hebridean island of Islay. The project developed following Alan’s research into Viking settlement in Islay where the collation and analysis of an extensive body of linguistic, environmental, archaeological, historical and cartographic material played a central role in establishing the nature and extent of Norse-native interaction during the Viking Age.
The map-based searchable interface is now available and holds a map of Islay showing local historic sites and features, as well as a family history of people who once lived on Islay and the places associated with them.
Learn more about the Islay Life Explorer
Learn more about Dr Macniven's work on his research profile
5 May 2020
Prof Michelle Keown and Dr David Farrier, both English Literature, have recorded interviews with the BBC which are available on the BBC Sounds website.
Prof Keown’s BBC radio 4 interview with James Nokise, a comedian and stage performer from New Zealand, explores the role of Pacific wordsmiths, from song writers to poets, who have used their craft to protest against nuclear testing. This includes excerpts from indigenous antinuclear poetry from the Pacific (including Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's work). Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poems were developed as part of Michelle’s Marshallese Arts Project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund.
Dr Farrier's BBC Radio 3 interview with Rana Mitter is also available. The discussion, entitled Deep Time and Human History, is part of the BBCs Free Thinking segment and includes interviews with authors Lewis Dartnell and Gaia Vince. Dr Farrier talks about his new book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, which tells a story of a world that is changing rapidly, and with long-term consequences.
Listen to Prof Keown's interview on the BBC Sounds website [external]
Learn more about Prof Keown's work on her research profile
Listen to Dr Farrier's interview on the BBC Sounds website [external]
Learn more about Dr Farrier's work on his research profile
5 May 2020
We are delighted to announce that English Literature will be hosting two Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellows later this year.
Dr Anna Pilz, supervised by Prof Penny Fielding, will be researching a literary and cultural history of Irish and Scottish coastal routes. Dr Pilz is currently completing her time as Carson Fellow in Munich.
Francesca Saggini, currently Professor in English Literature at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia (Viterbo), Italy will be undertaking her project on reimagining romantic drama for new audiences, with Prof Melissa Terras as supervisor.
Both Fellows will spend two years in Edinburgh undertaking their projects whilst based in the Department of English Literature, within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.
Read more about Dr Pilz work at the Carson Center [external]
Read more about Prof Fielding's work on her Research Profile
Read more about Prof Terras's work on her Research Profile
5 May 2020
Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier, of the English Literature Department, has been awarded a Barra International Fellowship by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This one-month fellowship supports research in residence in the rare book and manuscript collections where Prof Bernier will undertake research for her new project ‘Sacrifice is Survival: Black Families Fight for Freedom in the USA and Canada (1732-1936)’.
The Barra Fellowships were established in 1988 by the Barra Foundation of Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, to foster international study of early American history, with two fellowships awarded annually.
Read more about Prof Bernier’s work on her research profile
22 April 2020
Digital magazine Public Books has featured a commissioned article from Professor Penny Fielding, Grierson Professor of English Literature, who revisits Stamboul Train, the "maddening" espionage novel that launched Grahame Greene's career in 1932. Penny considers the politics of the novel, and reflects on the reminder it provides that not all books can be easily categorised within genres, nor all plots within specific historic moments.
Read the article on the Public Books website [external]
Read more about Professor Fielding's research on her Research Profile
22 April 2020
At the beginning of this year, a new monograph by Dr Anna Vaninskaya, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, was published by Palgrave. Fantasies of Time and Death reveals the unique contribution made by the three founding fathers of British fantasy - Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien - to our culture's perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity.
It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history.
Read more about Dr Vaninskaya's work on her Research Profile
22 April 2020
LLC is delighted to announce that The Adventures of China Iron, a co-translation project by Dr Fiona Mackintosh, Senior Lecturer and Co-Head of Section for Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, and Dr Iona Macintyre, Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, has been shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book translated into English, and celebrates the vital work of translators. Out of 124 considered titles, The Adventures of China Iron was long-listed in February, and made the final shortlist of six titles earlier this month.
The work is a translation of Las Aventuras de la China Iron by contemporary Argentinian novelist Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and was published in Summer 2019.
The winner was due to be announced in May but the Booker Prize Foundation has confirmed it wants to make sure readers could get their hands on the shortlist. A new date will be announced in due course.
Read more about Dr Mackintosh's work on her Research Profile
Read more about Dr Macintyre's work on her Research Profile
22 April 2020
Although a physical book launch was unfortunately unable to go ahead, Dr David Farrier, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, held a virtual launch for his new book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. The online launch took place on Twitter last month, complete with recorded readings, recommended reading lists and a Q&A session.
Footprints tells a story of a world that is changing rapidly, and with long-term consequences. It has been featured as one of The Revelator's 'Nine New Environmental Books You Need to Read' in March, and was selected as The Week's book of the week earlier this month.
Dr Farrier’s Leverhulme Trust International Academic Fellowship in 2016 to the University of New South Wales in Sydney contributed to a key chapter in the book.
Read more about Dr Farrier's work on his Research Profile
20 April 2020
We are delighted to announce that Dr Raquel Ribeiro, Lecturer in Portuguese and Co-Head of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, has been awarded a six-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
The Fellowship will allow Raquel to complete research and writing of her monograph, which will be the first comprehensive study of cultural production resulting from the Cuban presence in the Civil War in Angola (1975-1991). By relying on historical data and an array of sources gathered in part through fieldwork in Cuba, Raquel’s research analyses how Cubans have individually and collectively addressed the memory of the Angolan war, and how memories of the conflict inform culture and identity in post-war Cuba.
Read more about Dr Ribeiro's work on her Research Profile
31 January 2020
Dr Natalie Ferris, one of LLC’s Leverhulme Early Career Fellows in English Literature, will be hosting a new interdisciplinary seminar series, co-convened with colleagues in ECA, with the first seminar taking place on Friday 31st January. ‘Radical Notations’ is a public forum that brings together national and international scholars, curators, designers and thinkers to explore the relationship between literature, technology and design, and to question how these interactions shape cultural change.
The series draws on research in related fields, including anthropology, history of art, and the medical humanities, to explore what creative and critical approaches have arisen to answer to ethical, social and political pressures of the age.
Each seminar will take place in the final week of the month, and the full series programme can be found via the link below:
Link to Radical Notations seminar series programme
Read more about Dr Ferris's work on her Research Profile
17 January 2020
The Cantos Project run by Dr Andy Taylor, senior Lecturer in English Literature, and Dr Roxana Preda, Leverhulme Fellow in English Literature will be hosting a reading of Ezra Pound's poetry on Thursday 23 January at The Scottish Poetry Library.
This event showcases the Fifth Decad of Cantos (42-51) that Ezra Pound composed in 1934-36. As The Cantos tell a multitude of stories, readers and listeners do not need to follow the poem from the beginning to respond to them – the decad includes some of the most beautiful cantos Pound ever wrote, invoking both the pagan magic of Italian religious rituals and the fascination of Chinese landscapes.
Admission for the event is free but booking is hlighly recommended.
Book your ticket via EventBrite
Learn more about The Cantos Project
7 January 2020
LLC is pleased to confirm that we have secured two Royal Society of Edinburgh Small Grants.
Professor Rob Dunbar, Chair of Celtic Languages, Literature, History and Antiquities has received funding to support research into the archival record of Gaelic in Canada. Professor Dunbar will travel to several archives throughout Canada to conduct research for a forthcoming publication about the social and cultural history of Gaelic in Canada.
Dr Mark McLeister, Lecturer in Chinese Studies has secured an award which will allow him to travel to an established fieldsite in China to continue his research on the life-course of Chinese Christians. Dr McLeister will be focusing on naming conventions and church festivals during these two trips.
To find out more about Professor Dunbar’s work, visit his research profile
To find out more about Dr McLeister’s work, visit his research profile
7 January 2020
LLC is pleased to confirm that Dr David Overend, Lecturer in Drama and Performance Studies has been awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Workshop Grant for his Performing Wild Geographies rewilding project.
This series of three workshops will bring together artists, scientists, geographers and conservationists to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to rewilding, a topic which Dr Overend has worked extensively on.
Read more about Dr Overend’s work on his research profile
7 January 2020
LLC is delighted to announce that Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier, Personal Chair in United States and Atlantic Studies, has secured two funding awards to complete her new project: Sacrifice is Survival: Black Families Fight for Freedom in the USA and Canada (1732-1936).
The project will explore the lives of unexamined intergenerational families and kinship communities in an attempt to challenge dominant narratives and exclusionary histories that typically focus on exceptional and heroic exemplars.
Professor Bernier has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Small Grant which will enable her to complete two publications and curate a major commissioned exhibition in partnership with the National Library of Scotland.
Read more about Professor Bernier’s work on her research profile
26 November 2019
On Friday 6 December, Celtic & Scottish Studies and the School of Scottish Studies Archives are hosting a musical and literary celebration of the legacy of Hamish Henderson. Two events will take place to mark the 100-year anniversary of his birth, a symposium hosted within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures and a concert at the Queen’s Hall in the evening.
The evening event features highlights from the Rebellious Truth project, curated by Dr Lori Watson, Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology.
Find out more Hamish Henderson
For more information on the symposium and to book your free ticket, please visit the event page [external website]
For more information on the concert and to book tickets, please visit the event page [external website]
Read more about Dr Watson’s work on her research profile
7 November 2019
Research conducted by Dr Suzanne Trill (English Literature) and Dr Cordelia Beattie (History) has been used to inform a theatre performance which will run as part of the Being Human Festival in November 2019. The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton is a one-woman performance based on the handwritten notebooks of Alice Thornton (1626-1707) which will take place at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on 14th and 16th November.
This event is part of the Being Human Festival, the UK’s only festival of the humanities, bringing together universities with creative partners to stage stimulating and engaging activities that make research accessible and relevant.
For more details and to book, please visit the event homepage [external]
For more details on the Being Human Festival, please visit their website [external]
Read more about Dr Trill’s work on her research profile
14 October 2019
Two of our Postdoctoral Fellows have recently published work informed by the research they have undertaken as part of their fellowships.
Dr Stuart Dunmore, BA Postdoctoral Fellow in Celtic and Scottish Studies, has published Language Revitalisation in Scotland: Linguistic Practice and Ideology (EUP). This book explores the long-term outcomes of bilingual education and their implications for language revitalisation efforts internationally.
Dr Michael Wood, BA Postdoctoral Fellow in German Studies, was editor for the recently published Anglo-German Dramatic and Poetic Encounters. Focusing on particular cases of Anglo-German exchange in the period known as the Sattelzeit (1750-1850), this volume of essays explores how drama and poetry played a central role in the development of British and German literary cultures.
14 October 2019
Prof Tom Mole, Director of the Centre for the History of the Book, has published a new book, which explores the ways in which books transform us as individuals and why, even with the arrival of other media, books still have the power to change lives.
Learn more about the Centre for the History of the Book
Read more about Prof Mole’s work on his research profile
11 October 2019
Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier is currently touring Scotland with Parisa Urquhart, an independent documentary producer to screen the documentary film Strike for Freedom: Frederick Douglass in Scotland. The 20-minute film is based on research undertaken by Prof Bernier during her AHRC funded project Our Bondage and Our Freedom.
As well as showing the short film, Bernier and Urquhart will both give talks and there will be a Q&A session. Please see below for further event details and to book tickets:
- Playfair Library, Edinburgh, 14 October 2019 Visit the event page to register for this free event
- Dumbarton Central Library, Dumbarton, 18 October 2019 Visit the event page to register for this free event
- Robert Burns Museum, Ayr, 20 October 2019 Visit the event page to register for this free event
- Aberdeen Central Library, Aberdeen, 21 October 2019 Visit the event page to register for this free event
Read more about Prof Bernier’s work on her research profile
Our Bondage and Our Freedom's Research page
8 August 2019
With the summer festival programme well under way, LLC is excited to highlight the performance of How Not to Drown, a collaboration between Dr Nicola McCartney (Reader, Writing for Theatre and Performance) and playwright Dritan Kastrati.
The play shares the true story of Dritan, as an 11-year-old Kosovan-Albanian refugee making his way on the perilous route to the UK. As well as writing the piece alongside Nicola, Dritan himself stars in the play with four other actors, who together portray his journey and experiences on arriving in the UK.
Read The Guardian review of How Not to Drown
Book your tickets via the Edinburgh Fringe website
Read more about Dr McCartney's work on her research profile
31 July 2019
LLC is delighted to confirm that Dr Hannah-Rose Murray has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and will join the English Literature department in September.
Her project ‘Daguerreotyped on my Heart: Transatlantic African American visual and textual resistance in the British Isles’ will focus on the various ways in which formerly enslaved individuals utilised visual and textual cultures in narratives to educate white transatlantic audiences about US chattel slavery.
30 July 2019
Dr Gabor Sebo has been awarded the 2019-20 Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to be hosted at Edinburgh and mentored by Dr Youngmi Kim.
Dr Sebo will be joining us as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in a visiting scholar capacity. This will be a great addition to the Asian Studies department as the Centre for Korean Studies becomes established.
Learn more about Korean Studies at the University of Edinburgh
Read more about Dr Kim's work on her research profile
9 July 2019
LLC is delighted to announce that Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Lecturer in Latin American Studies, has been awarded a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant for her project ‘Puerto Rican Artists' Books: A Nexus between Latin America, the United States and Europe’. This award will enable Dr Gordon-Burroughs to undertake archival research at Princeton University, University of Puerto Rico and Casa del Libro - a rare public book collection located in San Juan.
Learn more about Dr Gordon-Burrough's work on her research profile
12 June 2019
Dr Youngmi Kim and her colleagues in Asian Studies have received funding from the Academy of Korean Studies to establish the Scottish Centre of Korean Studies (CKS) at the University of Edinburgh. The three year funding programme will provide support for teaching and research in Korean Studies and support towards tuition fees.
Learn more about Korean Studies at the University of Edinburgh
Read more about Dr Kim's work on her research profile
06 June 2019
Dr Michael Wood, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, is co-organising a 2 day conference entitled Configuring 'World Theatre': Gaining Global Perspectives on Transnational and Intercultural Drama and Performance.
Configuring 'World Theatre' takes place on 20th and 21st June 2019 and is co-funded by the Open World Research Initiative, the British Academy, St Andrews University, and the University of Edinburgh. The event is aimed at bringing together scholars from Modern Languages departments and related disciplines within the Arts and Humanities from across the world for two days of discussion on the topic of World Theatre and will feature a keynote talk by by Osita Okagbue (Goldsmiths) and a performance of Henry Roberts’s "The Swallow and the Nightingale" by Boxed-In Theatre, followed by post-performance discussion with cast and crew.
For more information and to book your place, visit the conference webpage
Read more about Dr Wood's work on his resarch profile
06 May 2019
Dr Leanne Dawson, Senior Lecturer in German and Film Studies, will be hosting an event on the afternoon of Friday 10 May to celebrate the launch of the Queer Screens Network - an inclusive platform for everyone, within the academy and beyond, working at or interested in the intersection of LGBTQI+ matters and the screen (very broadly defined).
This free event, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will comprise a series of short film screenings, panel discussions, and a networking social as well as complimentary refreshments.
Book your place via Eventbrite [external link]
For more information, visit the Queen Screens Network website [external link]
Read more about Dr Dawson’s work on her research profile
18 April 2019
LLC is delighted to announce that Dr Mark McLeister, Lecturer in Chinese Studies, has been awarded a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust.
The award will fund Mark to travel to China for two months, to undertake fieldwork on names and naming within the Christian community. This project will produce the first study of Chinese Protestant names and naming practices, and will help shape our understanding of how identities of Christians in the People's Republic of China are established.
Read more about Dr McLeister's work on his research profile
16 April 2019
LLC are very happy to announce that Dr Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, English Literature, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her project ‘Laughing Matters: Comedy and the Ethical Spectator, 1660-1737’ which examines the relationship between comedy and compassion. Rebecca’s 16 month fellowship will provide time to complete a planned monograph.
Read more about Dr Tierney-Hynes's work on her research profile
01 April 2019
Dr Natalie Ferris, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in English Literature, will be speaking at the National Library of Scotland on Thursday 11 April as part of Spy Week 2019. Her talk will explore the lesser known literary history of Bletchley Park - former headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School, famed for it's role in wartime intelligence.
Click here to register for this free event
Find out more about Spy Week 2019
Click here to read an interview with Spy Week intern, Huzan Bharucha
Read more about Dr Ferris's work on her research profile
15 March 2019
LLC are delighted to announce that Dr Paul Crosthwaite, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, has been involved in the creation of a free online course - Understanding Money: The History of Finance, Speculation and the Stock Market. Dr Crosthwaite worked with partners at Lancaster University and FutureLearn to develop the course aimed at a diverse range of users.
Click here for more information and to read the interview with Dr Crosthwaite
Find out more and sign up on FutureLearn [external website]
Read more about Dr Crosthwaite's work on his research profile
13 February 2019
As part of the 2019 Edinburgh Iranian Festival, the latest instalment of the Iranian Film Festival will take place from Friday 1st March to Friday 8th March.
The 2019 Festival is curated by Dr Nacim Pak-Shiraz (IMES), alongside icon of Iranian cinema Fatemeh Motamed-Arya. Across narratives dealing with mental health, social deprivation, and war, amongst others, the festival films explore the complexities of forging and maintaining relationships in Iranian society, past and present.
As well as a week of film screenings taking place at the Filmhouse Edinburgh, the Festival will also feature the Iranian Short Film Showcase. Dr Nacim Pak-Shiraz will also be conducting a number of panel discussions with directors, distributors and film critics.
Click here for more information on the various film events taking place throughout the week [external link]
The Edinburgh Iranian Festival is celebrating its tenth year this year. The Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Alwaleed Centre at LLC are two of the sponsors of the season.
Click here for more information about the Edinburgh Iranian Festival [external link]
24 January 2019
LLC are delighted to announce that Prof Tom Mole’s book 'What the Victorians Made of Romanticism' has won the Saltire Society Literary Award for Research Book of the Year.
For more information on the Saltire Society and the 2018 shortlist please visit their website [external link]
Learn more about the shortlisted book in this interview with Prof Mole
Read more about Prof Mole’s work on his research profile
24 January 2019
Dr Michelle Keown has successfully secured Follow on Funding from the AHRC for her project titled ‘Navigating Futures: arts education as a route to youth empowerment and pedagogical innovation’. Working in conjunction with Moray House School of Education, Dr Keown seeks to build on the research and resources produced from a previous project funded under the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) exploring challenges concerning the education, self-expression and wellbeing of young people living in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Read More about Dr Keown’s work on her research profile
Find out more about the GCRF funded project, ‘From Displacement to Development’, on the UKRI website [external link]
24 January 2019
LLC are pleased to welcome Dr Beatrice Alex to the School as part of the English Literature department. Dr Alex is Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and has recently been awarded a fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute. In addition, the Alan Turing Institute has provided funding of £136,593 to enable Beatrice and a research fellow to undertake a research project on large-scale and robust text mining, mining large collections of neuroimaging data held in electronic health records for the whole of Scotland and the Greater Manchester area.
Read More about Dr Alex's work on her research profile
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18 January 2019
Peter Davies, Professor of Modern German Studies Studies, will present the 19th Holocaust Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow entitled 'Whose words, whose voices? What thinking about translation can tell us about the Holocaust'.
Almost everything we know about the Holocaust comes to us through translation; the Holocaust, as a multilingual event, is literally unthinkable without translation. For decades, thousands of translators, professional and non-professional, named and anonymous have made testimonies, documents, historical sources and works of art available and understandable in dozens of languages and for audiences across the world. So why is it that we talk so little about translation and translators? And why is it that translators only become visible when something goes wrong, accused of distortion, or worse, betrayal of the authentic voice of a witness?
This lecture will set out the extent of our dependence on translation, discuss the ethics of translating, and pay tribute to the work of the translators who have made the Holocaust understandable for us. But it will also suggest something perhaps more uncomfortable: that translators do not just transmit pre-existing knowledge about the Holocaust from one language to another, but they help to form that knowledge in the first place, and have had a profound effect on how the Holocaust is understood, interpreted and talked about.
Event Details: Date: Tuesday 22 January 2019 Venue: Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre Doors open: 5.30pm, Teas and coffees will be served at this point Lecture starts: 6.00pm Lecture ends: 7.15pm
This event is free to attend, however you are required to register before attending. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/19th-holocaust-memorial-lecture-professor-peter-davies-tickets-53288672855
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7 January 2019
Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, Lecturer in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, recently commenced an 18-month AHRC Leadership Fellowship on Indigenous filmmaking from Latin America.
This grant has enabled Dr Gleghorn to visit Guatemala to conduct research during the 13th International Indigenous Film and Media festival organised by the CLACPI. This included running a one-day forum on audiovisual translation and Indigenous filmmaking with invited guests sharing their experiences of working with subtitling, dubbing and circuits of film exhibition with Indigenous communities. Insights from the event will feed into Charlotte’s ongoing work on audiovisual translation and Indigenous film from Latin America.
Click here to read more about the audiovisual translation forum (in Spanish) [External Link]
Read more about Dr Gleghorn’s work on her research profile
Click here to learn more about CLACPI (in Spanish) [External Link]
11 December 2018
The RSE has awarded a small grant to Dr Nacim Pak-Shiraz for her research project ‘Women Depicting the Freedom of Movement in Public and Private Spaces in Iran’. Dr Pak-Shiraz will use her expertise in both Film and Iranian Studies to produce a meaningful study of the cultures and societies of the Middle East as represented through Iranian Cinema.
Read more about Dr Pak-Shiraz’s work on her research profile
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10 December 2018
The RSE has awarded a small grant to Dr Nicolo Maldina for his research project ‘Vernacular Psalmodies: Interpretations and uses of the Psalms in Dante’s Comedy’. This grant allows Dr Maldina to continue his research on Dante and Medieval religious culture over the next 12 months.
Read more about Dr Maldina’s work on his research profile
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22 November 2018
Dr Helen Parker has successfully secured funding from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for a research trip to Japan. During this trip Dr Parker will engage in fieldwork and archival research to inform her upcoming monograph ‘Ginza Kabukiza: Kabuki in Cultural Context’.
Read more about Dr Parker’s work on her research profile
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Dr Leanne Dawson has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship for her project ‘Poor Queers: The Intersection of Working-Class and LGBTQI+ Identity in British Film’. Leanne’s research will explore working-class LGBTQI+ representation in British cinema from the 1980s onwards, focusing on representations of identity and the underpinning socio-political ideology.
Read more about Dr Dawson’s work on her research profile
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Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier appears in the new 2-part BBC documentary Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame.
The programme investigates the ways in which the Scottish people were involved in the slave trade and how the profits of slavery have shaped modern Scotland.
The first episode aired on BBC Two on 6 November 2018 at 9pm and can viewed via iPlayer.
Watch the first episode on the BBC iPlayer [external link]
Read more about Prof Bernier’s work on her research profile
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2 November 2018
Lessons from Three Centuries of Financial Advice: A Showcase of Research in the Economic Humanities
Dr Paul Crosthwaite, senior Lecturer in English Literature, is currently involved in an interdisciplinary AHRC funded project exploring the History of Financial Advice. Starting in January 2016 and running until January 2019, the project aims to bring together literary critics and economic historians to study the meaning of finance and money.
The University of Edinburgh will be hosting a showcase of the research undertaken during the project and we welcome you to join us at this free event on Wednesday 5th December.
Find out more by visiting The History of Financial Advice blog [external link]
Visit the event page for more information and to reserve your place
23 October 2018
The British Academy have awarded a small grant of just over £7500 to Prof Laura Bradley for her research project ‘Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship’. Laura will spend two years investigating the role of onstage spectatorship in the plays and productions of Bertolt Brecht.
Read more about Prof Bradley’s work on her research profile
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22 October 2018
Prof Tom Mole’s book 'What the Victorians Made of Romanticism' has been shortlisted for the 2018 Saltire Society Literary Awards.
The Saltire Society is committed to celebrating and supporting achievements within the literary community, with this prize considered one of the most prestigious in Scotland.
The school hopes you will join us in congratulating Prof Mole on this nomination within the 'Research Book' category. The Awards Ceremony will be held in Edinburgh on 30 November.
For more information on the Saltire Society and the 2018 shortlist please visit their website [external link]
Learn more about the shortlisted book in this interview with Prof Mole
Read more about Prof Mole’s work on his research profile
4 October 2018
LLC and Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier are pleased to announce that ‘Strike for Freedom: Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection’ has now opened at the National Library of Scotland (NLS).
The exhibition marks 200 years since the birth of Frederick Douglass, African American activist and author who devoted his life to fighting for social justice and campaigning against anti-slavery.
On display for the first time are manuscripts, letters and photographs, on loan from the Walter O. Evans Collection, which place Douglass and his family in relation to transatlantic abolitionism and black radical reform movements.
The Exhibition runs until 16 February 2019.
Find out more about Strike for Freedom on the NLS website
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14 September 2018
LLC are delighted to announce that two Leverhulme Early Career Fellows will join us in the coming months. From 1st October, Dr Natalie Ferris will be based within English Literature with her project ‘Technicities of Illusion: Dynamism and Deception in Post-War Literature’, exploring the ways in which post-war literature has contemplated the perceptual challenges posed by movement, optical illusion, and new media. Dr Jenny Watson will join the Department of European Languages and Cultures on 1st February, her project ‘Restless Earth: Landscapes of Extra-Concentrationary Violence After 1945’ analysing representations of landscape as a repository of cultural memory of marginal histories of the Holocaust in German-language literature. <%2