Professor John Burnside has been awarded the Spycher Leuk Literaturpreis. As a result of this prize, John will reside in Leuk (Switzerland) for two months a year for the next five years and write.

Dr Sara Lodge has been awarded a grant by the Carnegie Trust to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard to work on Edward Lear's manuscripts there. Her project is called ‘The Other Edward Lear: Dissent, Alienation, and Sociability’, and she will be looking at the major archive of Lear materials at the Houghton, which includes diaries, unpublished prose pieces and artwork, and a large amount of correspondence. (Lear himself admitted gleefully that he corresponded with ‘every created human being capable of writing ever since the invention of letters … with a few exceptions perhaps, such as the prophet Ezekiel, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Venerable Bede’.) Sara is particularly interested in Lear’s heritage as part of a family of religious dissenters and how this affects his own religious and social outlook. Lear’s world is one of tolerance, in which oddity is endemic. The relationship between his intense sociability and his cultural self-alienation (he spent most of his life travelling) makes him a particularly fascinating figure in a Victorian landscape where, as one friend reported, he was ‘all things to all people’ and yet often went out of his way to get out of theirs.

Dr Susan Manly has been awarded a grant to undertake research in Dublin, and this trip will enable her to look at the Maria Edgeworth manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland. She will be focusing on the letters and notes from the period 1787–1804, when Edgeworth was extremely productive, writing four collections of tales for children and young people as well as her educational manual, Practical Education, and four works for adult readers (mainly fiction). Susan will concentrate on the letters that deal with the work for children and younger readers: this archival work will underpin her chapter on Edgeworth in her current book project, Schools for Treason, which looks at radical and reformist work for children by Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Aikin and Edgeworth. She will also be looking at this material with an eye to thinking about a possible edition of Edgeworth's letters. No scholarly edition of her letters exists that focuses on her early, and most productive period – coincidentally the period in which she was published by Joseph Johnson, who was the hub of radical political, philosophical and literary publication in the 1790s and into the early 1800s.

A special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, edited by Dr Emma Sutton and Dr Michael Downes (Director of Music, St Andrews), was published in April. Entitled ‘Opera and the Novel’, the special issue explores the relationship between these two genres, looking at operatic adaptations of novels and novels that are, in various ways, about opera. The eight critical essays consider examples ranging from settings of Don Quixote in the 1690s to contemporary adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Sophie’s Choice, and these essays are complemented by composer Professor Robin Holloway’s reflections on his 1976 setting of Clarissa. Collectively, the essays consider various formal, historical and theoretical questions demonstrating the proliferation of connections between these two apparently contrasted genres.

Professor Gill Plain’s essay, ‘From Shorty Blake to Tubby Binns: Dunkirk and the Representation of Working-Class Masculinity in Postwar British Cinema’, has been published in the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 9, no. 2 (2012).

Lesley Glaister’s story, ‘Hero’, has been accepted for publication in A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening: New Writing Scotland 30 (2012); another story, ‘Just Watch Me’, will appear in a forthcoming edition of The Edinburgh Review.

Dr Margaret Connolly is organising a conference at the British Academy, 21-23 June, on the topic of medieval manuscript miscellanies. The conference title is ‘Insular Books: Vernacular Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain’, and full details are given on the BA’s Public Events Programme pages. The conference is funded by the British Academy.

Dr Sarah Dillon will be giving an invited lecture entitled ‘“Talking about the same questions but at another rhythm”: Deconstruction and Film’ at J. Hillis Miller: The Theory to Come, an international symposium being held at the University of Lancaster on Friday, 1 June.

Dr Ian Johnson is a participant in the international collaborative workshop, Processes Of Religious Acculturation in the (Very) Long Fifteenth Century, to be held in Belfast and Armagh, 6–8 June 2012, where he will be speaking in a session on ‘Texts and Manuscripts’ on the subject of Acculturating Transcendence and Transcending Acculturation: Godly Processes and Medieval Texts. This paper discusses the performative, theological and cultural implications of translating prayer from Latin to vernacular in the 1400s and beyond. This workshop, the second in the Processes Of Religious Acculturation series, is being hosted as part of the long-standing Queen’s Belfast-St Andrews collaboration of Ian and Professor John Thompson of QUB’s School of English with the University of Groningen research group led by Dr Sabrina Corbellini. The purpose of these meetings is for scholars to share findings and methods and to create and develop initiatives for interdisciplinary, Europe-wide, cross-period research that can best be done by means of international collaboration. Processes Of Religious Acculturation takes both a European and local perspective and moves across the boundaries/joins of medieval and modern, script and print. It provides a forum for exploring, for example, topics involving the multimedial movement and management of religious information and ideology; the education and changing role of the laity; the shifting functional diversities of religious texts, Latin and vernacular, and the varying repertoires of makers and consumers of texts. Both John and Ian spoke at first of these workshops in Groningen in January, and a third is planned for Vienna in December. Processes Of Religious Acculturation has attracted the participation and support of research groups from the Sorbonne and Vienna-Prague. The Belfast-Armagh event will be hosting collaborating scholars from Scotland, Northern Ireland, The Netherlands, The Czech Republic, USA, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark, Italy, Wales and Switzerland.

Dr Sara Lodge will be giving an invited lecture on Edward Lear at the Scottish Arts Club on Friday, 8 June. Last month, she was also asked to mark Lear’s 200th birthday on May 12th by giving a short speech on the steps of Stratford Place in London, Lear’s former home, where the Mayor of Westminster unveiled a green plaque. Penelope Wilton, taking a brief break from filming Downton Abbey, read ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and there was a reception at the Fine Arts Club followed by further readings in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Extracts from the Lear radio essay series she did for Radio 3 from 30 April – 4 May were featured on Radio 4’s ‘Pick of the Week’.

On June 28 Phillip Mallett shall lecture at the Dorset County Museum on ‘Susan Henchard’s writing-desk: Thomas Hardy and the Penny Post’, inaugurating a series of lectures sponsored by the National Trust. His PhD student Jacqueline Dillion will also be talking in the series later, on the custom of ‘handfesting’ on Portland, and its representation in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved.

Professor Don Paterson will speak at the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada on 7 June. On Sunday, 10 June he will appear at HowTheLightGetsIn festival at Hay where he will take part in a panel discussion on the concept of play, a solo event on physics and poetry and a further panel discussion on the role of irony in the communication of truths.

Dr Louise Wilson will be speaking at the SAMEMES (Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies) conference on Literature, Science and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern England in Lausanne at the end of June. Dr Wilson and Professor Neil Rhodes will also be speaking on an MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations panel at the SRS (Society for Renaissance Studies) conference in Manchester in July.

Called 60 Years in 60 Poems, this project has been commissioned as part of The Space, a digital arts channel from Arts Council England and the BBC. The website features actors’ readings of all 60 poems – Professor Crawford’s poem is read by Dan Stevens – selected archive footage from the BBC, Movietone and various image archives, and a design that uses generative techniques to create unique artworks for each poem. It will be launched on Thursday, 31 May, just ahead of the Jubilee weekend.

The ongoing work of identifying and acquiring items for the collection has been done in consultation with Professor Susan Sellers and Drs Ian Blyth and Emma Sutton. An account of this process, together with some examples of the books in the collection, can be found on Special Collections’s Echoes from the Vault blog.

Paul Johnston’s fourteenth novel, The Green Lady, has been delivered and will be published in hardback in October by Crème de la crime. He has also acted as a judge for the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger.

Verita Sriratana will be giving a talk at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University Thailand on 7 June. Her topic is ‘“It is nature that is the ruin of Wembley”: Virginia Woolf and the British Empire Exhibition’.

On Friday, 1 June, Tsung-Han Tsai will be presenting a paper entitled ‘The Racial Politics of E. M. Forster’s Idea of Rhythm’ at the annual English Graduate Conference at the University of Oxford. The theme of the conference is ‘Return to the Political: Literary Aesthetics and the Influence of Political Thought’.