Professor Robert Crawford’s Simonides: Body Bags, which was broadcast on Radio 4 on 27 November 2011 (and repeated on 3 December 2011), has been nominated by the BBC for a Sony Radio Academy Award (see the November 2011 news page for more details of this programme). Nominations for the awards will be announced late March/early April and the winners revealed at the 2012 Ceremony on Monday, 14 May at Grosvenor House, London.

Simonides has also been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Robert joins fellow poets Simon Armitage, Julia Copus, Lavinia Greenlaw, Andrew Motion and Christopher Reid on the shortlist. The judges are Edmund de Waal, Sarah Maguire and Michael Symmons Roberts in conjunction with the Poetry Society and the winner will be announced later in March.

Dr Jane Pettegree’s monograph, Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588-1611 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which ‘explores how the dramatic embodiment of English national identity responded to a period of dynastic transition and rapid political and cultural change’, has been nominated by the publisher in connection with the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, which is given to the author of a first monograph which has ‘made an important contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare, his theatre, or his contemporaries’. The shortlist will be announced in April.

Last month, Dr Margaret Connolly spoke at the Medieval Weekend organized by Dr Michael Downes and Tom Wilkinson at the Music Centre on 18-19 February. She was a speaker in the final panel discussion about ‘Music and Late Medieval Culture in St Andrews’.

Also last month, Professor Neil Rhodes spoke at the St Andrews Institute for Contemporary and Comparative Literature on 'The MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations'. This took place on 29 February.

WAR-Net, the interdisciplinary research network for scholars working on war and representation jointly organised by Professor Gill Plain and Dr Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London), will have its fourth meeting on 9 March at Birkbeck. This meeting will be a showcase for WAR-Net members' research interests and will feature papers on everything from the comedy of war in the long eighteenth century to technology and the subject in the Iraq war. The keynote speakers are Professor Debra Kelly of the University of Westminster on 'Not the Usual Suspects? Mapping the French Presence in Second World War London' and Professor Mary Favret of the University of Indiana, speaking about 'Wartime Britain's General Fast and Humiliation'.

Professor Gill Plain will also be speaking at the War and Cinema International Symposium taking place at the School of English on Saturday, 17 March. The Symposium is organised by Professor Robert Burgoyne and the St Andrews Department of Film Studies, and speakers include Professors Elisabeth Bronfen, Ian Christie and Garrett Stewart. Gill will be giving a paper entitled 'How Not to Make A War Film: Dunkirk and the "National Trust"'.

Dr Sara Lodge is giving an invited paper on ‘Max Beerbohm, Camp Aesthetics and “1880”’ and is a roundtable respondent at a two-day Workshop on ‘The Literary 1880s’ sponsored by the British Academy, at the University of Edinburgh on 23–4 March.

On Friday, 30 March Professor Susan Sellers will be speaking at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in a joint lecture with novelist Clare Morgan entitled ‘Fictional Freedoms: Rewriting Virginia Woolf’.

On Wednesday, 14 March, Professor Don Paterson will be performing as part of the Dave Batchelor Quintet (with guest reader David Hayman) in Kind of Larkin, a celebration of Philip Larkin’s love of jazz. On Thursday, 15 March, Dr Ian Blyth will lead an interactive Poetry Walk around St Andrews, exploring 600 years of ‘town and gown’. Professor John Burnside will be giving an intimate ‘round table’ reading on the Thursday afternoon, and Professor Robert Crawford will be taking part in a Poetry Breakfast discussion (chaired by Dr Blyth) about images and imagery on the Saturday morning. Recent alumna (and Forward Prize winner) Dr Rachael Boast will be reading on the Saturday afternoon, and two other recent graduates of the School’s Creative Writing MLitt, Nuala Watt and Gill Andrews, will be reading on the Friday afternoon and Sunday lunchtime. On the Sunday afternoon, Dr Chris Jones will be giving a lecture in Parliament Hall on the archiving of Professor Douglas Dunn’s papers.

In addition to these readings and performances, Professor Crawford’s and Norman McBeath’s exhibition, Body Bags / Simonides, will be in the Byre Theatre from 5 March till 2 April, and six current and former teachers of poetry in the School will feature in Norman McBeath’s exhibition, Creative Capture: Six St Andrews Poets, which will be in the St Andrews Public Library from 15–18 March, before going on permanent display in the University Library.

Paul Johnston's story ‘Moon Landing’ has been published in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9.

John Patrick Pazdziora has had an article, ‘Shadows and Stories’ published in the latest issue of the online literary journal Paraxis.

Jessica Volz will be attending the jewellery show BaselWorld 2012 in Basel later this month for the launch of her edited book Ruth Grieco: Romancing the Stones. Last month, Jessica, whose PhD is on the forms and functions of visuality in Regency and early Victorian British fiction, was invited to the Dickens Bicentenary Wreathlaying Ceremony at Westminster Abbey and the Dickens Bicentenary Dinner at the Mansion House, London.