Professor Robert Crawford has been awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from 1 Sept 2012 until 31 Aug 2013 to work on volume one of his T. S. Eliot biography. The project is ‘Young T. S. Eliot’, the first volume of a two-volume biography of T. S. Eliot to be published by Cape in London and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York in 2015. This first volume will cover the years from Eliot’s birth in St Louis in 1888 up to the publication of ‘The Hollow Men’ in 1925.

The Essay: How Pleasant to Know You Mr Lear will be broadcast each evening at 10.45 pm from Monday 30th April to Friday 4th May, and features five different speakers, each examining a different aspect of Lear. Dr. Lodge’s opening essay considers the ‘submerged longing’ in Lear’s poetry. It argues that Lear is a Romantic poet, but one whose work incorporates both a desire for the sublime and the knowledge of its own absurdity: a tragi-comic dialogue between the domestic and the transcendent.

Other essayists include: Professor Robert Crawford talking about Lear’s ‘acoustic’ and his literary legacy in the work of T.S. Eliot; Dr Matthew Bevis exploring the ‘story of nonsense’ in the Victorian era; and the acclaimed cartoonist Ralph Steadman, talking about Lear’s birds and the relationship between Lear’s exuberantly comic creations and his own wild and defiant style.

A new scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf’s 1937 best-selling novel, The Years, co-edited by Dr Ian Blyth and Professor David Bradshaw (Worcester College, Oxford), was published by Wiley-Blackwell on 23 April. This volume is the latest addition to Wiley-Blackwell’s Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf. The bulk of Ian’s editorial research for The Years was conducted using the first editions and other Woolf material in St Andrews University Library Special Collections.

Nora Bartlett’s essay, ‘In Sickness and in Health: Courting and Nursing in Jane Austen’s Novels’, has been published in the Proceedings of the Scottish Society of the History of Medicine.

Set on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic, based loosely on the real island of Tristan da Cunha, the play tells the story of a small community isolated from the world beyond the ocean. The Dundee Rep’s new production features a stunning and highly ambitious set which will see the stage flooded with 29,000 litres of water that will move with the tides over the course of the show. Full details can be found here.

On 25 April, Dr Chris Jones gave the inaugural Edwin Morgan Lecture at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. His lecture was entitled ‘Here Be Dragons: Edwin Morgan, Beowulf and the Dragon’

Phillip Mallett recently spent ten days as a Visiting Scholar at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he lectured on ‘The Indian “Mutiny” in the Victorian Imagination’.

On Wednesday 3rd May, Professor Andrew Murphy will be giving a talk at Queen’s University, Belfast.

On Monday 7th May, Dr Sarah Dillon will be appearing live on BBC Radio Scotland’s The Book Café to review American novelist Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home. Also on 7 May, Sarah will be releasing the Press Release regarding the What Scientists Read website and project.

Professor Robert Crawford will be taking part with Ian Rankin and others in a BBC Radio 3 discussion about portraiture which will be recorded in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, on 7 May.

On 8 May Professor Susan Sellers will be giving a guest lecture at Kellogg College, Oxford, on the topic of ‘Writing and Real Life’. Further details here.

On Wednesday 9 May, Professor Paterson will be giving his inaugural lecture, ‘“I know what I have given you; I do not know what you have received”: Poetry, Paranoia and Errors in Transmission’, details here. In addition to this, on 3 May Professor Paterson will be doing a reading for the Edinburgh University Literary Society; on 13 May he will be reading for the Shirley Society, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge University; on 17 May he will be taking part in a Poetry Reading In Memory of Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, London; on 18 May he will be reading at Poetry East at the London Buddhist Centre; and on 24 May he will be taking part in a ‘Faber Poets’ event at the Brighton Festival.

While Rowling’s combination of fantasy and school-story genres, her use of folkloric archetypes and mythopoeic symbolism, and her social and religious messages have made the Harry Potter books a point of interest—and controversy—to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this conference seeks to critically explore Rowling’s concept of imaginative empathy: that ability to “learn and understand, without having experienced.” The conference organisers are PhD candidates John Pazdziora (English) and Fr. Micah Snell (Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts), with Dr Christopher MacLachlan (English), and keynote speakers include 'Hogwarts Professor' John Granger and Dr Jessica Tiffin (University of Cape Town).

For more details, please see the Conference programme (PDF, 214 KB)  

Image © 2011 Peter J. Herron

Katherine R. Cooper’s paper, ‘“My Cruel Conscience with Sharpned Knife”: Conscience as Vessel and Vivisector in Jacob's Well and a Meditation of a Penitent Sinner’, has been published in Exemplaria, 24: 1–2 (April 2012), 12–27

Marina Cano López has recently published an article, ‘This is a feminist novel: the paradox of female passivity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth’, in The Gaskell Journal (no. 25). This paper applies Judith Halberstam's theories of passivity, as exposed in Ben Davies’s and Jana Funke’s Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011), to Gaskell's Victorian novel.

Faith Acker will be presenting a paper titled ‘“Though the Butler’s dead, the keyes are left behind": Adapting and Adopting Poetical Memories of the Butlers of Christ Church, Oxford’ at the Manuscript Identities and the Transmission of Texts in the English Renaissance conference in Sheffield on May 25 and 26.

Tsung-Han Tsai will be presenting a paper entitled ‘“Worse than irritated—namely, insecure”: E. M. Forster and his Late Pilgrimage to Bayreuth’ at the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, Love to Death: Transforming Opera, which takes place in Cardiff from 31 May – 2 June.