Emeritus Professor Douglas Dunn received an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Edinburgh on 28 June 2012.

Professor Lorna Hutson will be ‘Alice Griffin Shakespeare Fellow’ at the University of Auckland from 21 July – 4 August, and will be giving the Alice Griffin Lecture on 26 July. The title of the lecture is: ‘“How long is it to Lammas-tide?”: circumstances in Romeo and Juliet’.

Professor Don Paterson received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

Dr Louise Wilson has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to be held in the School of English. The three-year award will allow her to pursue a research project entitled 'Reading for pleasure in early modern England'. The project brings together medical and humanist texts and popular prose to explore 'the physiology of reading' in the context of the growing market for fiction in the late sixteenth century.

Professor Susan Sellers has been awarded a research grant to travel to New York from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to work with the Shakespeare's Sister Company, a not-for-profit performing arts organisation, on a production of the play of her novel Vanessa and Virginia, and to look at Woolf manuscripts in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.

Tom Jones’s book, Poetic Langauge: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Present, will come out with Edinburgh University Press in July. This will be the first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspective. In a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems – by Walter Ralegh, John Milton,William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark – are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language. The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools (including analytical philosophy, cognitive poetics, structuralism and post-structuralism). Via close readings of poems from 1600 to the present readers are taken through a wide range of styles including modernist, experimental and innovative poetries.

Professor Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia has been published in Chinese. It is number 48 in the World’s Classics series with Nanjing University Press. The Chinese translator is Prof Yang Lixin, who was a visiting research fellow in the School of English in the winter of 2011.

Nora Bartlett has a piece called ‘Death and Entrances: A Close Reading of Chapter One of Sense and Sensibility’ in Persuasions, the online journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, in a special issue on Sense and Sensibility based on the conference that was held in the School last year (see PG News, below).

On Saturday 9 June, Dr Sara Lodge was asked to do an interview with Radio Scotland for Newsweek (8–9 am) about vampires in literature and culture. The news story was inspired by the recent finding of mediaeval Bulgarian corpses with iron stakes through the heart. Topics discussed included ‘why are vampires such a potent cultural myth?’ and ninteenth-century sources for our current images of the vampire.

On 18 June, E. H. Wright’s play of Professor Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia was given a rehearsed reading by the Shakespeare’s Sister Company in New York City.

On 9 July, Dr Sarah Dillon will be on BBC Radio Scotland's ‘The Book Café’ talking about her RSE Scottish Crucible funded collaborative research project, 'What Scientists Read: How does literature influence scientific thought and practice?'

On July 28, Dr Emma Sutton will be speaking on Radio 3 about music, eroticism and the cult of Tchaikovsky; the programme is part of a Proms broadcast of Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique' symphony.

Professor Don Paterson has contributed readings and interviews, as well as an abridged version of Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, to accompany the text alongside the Arden edition and commentary for the recently released Shakespeare’s Sonnets app for the iPad.

Drs Tom Jones and Sarah Dillon will chair sessions at ‘Rethinking Humanism’, an international conference hosted by the University of St Andrews Institute of European Cultural Identity Studies, in association with the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, from Thursday 28 June – Friday 29 June.

On 10 July, Professor John Burnside will be participating in The Blue Sofa, a public discussion and radio broadcast with Daniel Kehlmann, at Bertelsmann's in Berlin. On 11 July he will be giving a public reading at the Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin, and on 20/21 July he will be reading at Wege durch das Land, Detmold. On 8 August, Professor Burnside will be reading at the Wordsworth Conference, Grasmere, and from 17–21 August he will be taking part in The International Writer’s Conference at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

On Friday, 13 July Professor Don Paterson will read at the Latitude Festival. On Monday, 6 August, at the International Shakespeare conference, he will be in conversation with David Schalkwyk, Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He will give a reading that evening as part of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival. He is a judge of this year's Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition, and will attend the prize giving ceremony to be held during August. On 13 August he will take part in a panel discussion at the Edinburgh International Festival on the theme of ‘The Four Nations of the United Kingdom’.

On Thursday 30 and Friday 31 August, Dr Sarah Dillon will be running a conference on writer Maggie Gee in the School. Maggie Gee will be in attendance and the conference will culminate with a reading and Q&A by the author. The conference is part of Dr Dillon’s Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series.

‘200 Years of Sense and Sensibility’, a Special Issue of Persuasions On-Line (Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 2012), one of the journals of the Jane Austen Society of North America, has just been published. Edited by Marina Cano López, recent St Andrews graduate A. Rose Pimentel, and Susan Allen Ford, and including selected papers from the Austen Conference held in St Andrews last September, the issue is available online here.

Verita Sriratana will be presenting a paper entitled ‘“Because the waiting is a sort of Heaven, too, darling”: Travelling and Transitory Places in “Something Childish but very Natural”’ at the Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe conference, which will take place from 27 to 29 June at the Department of English, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Ružomberok, Slovakia. More details here.

Faith Acker will be delivering a paper titled ‘The Devil’s Butler and Five Bellows-makers: Sending and Mending Oxford’s Early Epitaphs’ at the Society for Renaissance Studies conference in Manchester this July.

Dustin Frazier will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Alfred: A Masque and Saxonist Patriotism in Britain, 1740-1785’ at the Emblems of Nationhood Conference, August 10–12 at St Andrews.

Doyeeta Majumder read a paper at the Marginal Cartographies Conference, at the University of Warwick.

As Director, Dr Jennings manages and develops the women’s studies curriculum, supervises undergraduate and master’s theses, chairs the Women’s Studies Advisory Council, and serves as the university’s public representative regarding current issues and trends related to women in academia and the broader community. Both promotions are career milestones for Dr Jennings, who was awarded a PhD from St Andrews in 2007.