He was awarded an MA in Issues in Modern Culture at UCL, and completed his PhD at Cardiff University, on gender and memory in representations of the Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is currently working on a project examining the cultural representation and collective memory of the 1947 Indian partition. He is comparing public memory narratives (in the form of literature, cinema, and museums) with private memory narratives (in the form of oral history interviews among members of the communities). He has taught at University College London, Cardiff University and the University of Glamorgan and his teaching interests include postcolonial theory, representations of war, comparative literature and film studies. He has published on museums and memorials, graffiti-art, and Indian cinema, and has edited a collection of essays: The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, forthcoming in 2013).

Professor John Burnside is one of the recipients of the Eccles Centre for American Studies’s 2013 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award. Now in its second year, the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award was set up as part of the Centre's charge to promote awareness of the British Library collections relating to the USA and Canada and to help facilitate the use of these collections. Each of the winners will use the collections to research their upcoming publications. Professor Burnside’s is a novel, which is described as very loosely a response to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird. The winners are awarded £20,000 each by the Eccles Centre and their residency will start in January 2013. Further details of the award can be found here.

Jake Polley’s new collection, The Havocs, has been shortlisted for the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize. Described as ‘a daring new collection from one of poetry’s rising stars’, The Havocs will be published by Picador on 8 November. Jake will also be reading at the Southbank Centre in London on 7 November: details here.

Zinnie wrote the libretto, and directed. 'The Garden' played as part of a weekend of contemporary operas on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 November.

As well as speakers from St Andrews, there were papers by scholars from the University of Toronto, the University of Leeds, Ghent University and Smith College. The closing lecture, ‘Folklore v Fakelore: An Imagined Conversation with Andrew Lang’, was given by the well-known American author Jane Yolen, who was the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture (previous lecturers have included John Buchan, Gilbert Murray and J. R. R. Tolkien).

Professor Nick Roe’s John Keats. A New Life was launched at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, in September. Present on that day were two direct descendants of Keats’s close friend Charles Brown (he emigrated to NZ in 1841). Professor Roe was interviewed by Katherine Freeman for Radio New Zealand’s ‘Arts on Sunday’ programme broadcast on 30 September and online here. He also lectured on Keats at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Thursday 11 October, and was interviewed live (for 25 minutes) on Dublin FM on Monday 15 October, and later that same evening on Radio 3’s Night Waves. The second book launch was at Keats House, Hampstead on Tuesday 16 October, and the Italian launch was at the Keats-Shelley House, Rome on Saturday 20 October. Professor Roe also gave a ‘Bindman Talk’ on Keats’s Scottish tour at the Jerwood Centre, Dove Cottage, Grasmere on 3 November.

On 25 and 26 October Phillip Mallet gave two invited lectures at the Gabriele d’Annunzio University, in Pescara: one “‘The Faint Image of a Lost City”: Ruskin and Venice’; the other ‘“Gli scopi della vita sono la difesa ottima contro la morte”: the Moral Vision of King Lear’. On 24 November, he will be lecturing in Dorchester on ‘“A Phantom of His Own Figuring”; Hardy, Emma and the “Poems of 1912-13”’.

Professor Susan Sellers gave a talk entitled ‘From Lighthouses to Paintbrushes: Things as Multi-Sensory Archives’ on Sunday 28 October at the ‘Performance: Art-Critique-Experiment’ conference organised by Cambridge University and the London University of the Arts. Further details about P:ACE can be found on their website.

From Monday 29 October until Thursday 1 November Professor Gill Plain lectured in Switzerland on her current book project, A Literary History of the 1940s: War, Postwar and Peace. At the University of Basel Gill discussed the escapist literature of writers such as Nancy Mitford and Georgette Heyer, exploring why they were so popular and what it was that people were trying to escape from. At the University of Bern, she gave a paper examining women’s postwar narratives of loss. Her book, covering fiction, poetry and drama of the 1940s, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2013.

On 10 November, Professor Don Paterson will be taking part in a panel discussion, From the PhD to the Printed Page, as part of the CHASE Consortium Creative/Critical Writing Conference for postgraduate students at UEA London. Further details here.

Dr Sarah Dillon will be taking part in an inter-disciplinary post-screening discussion panel of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics’s 2012 Film Festival in Edinburgh on Sunday 25 November.

Congratulations to Drs Megan Hoffman and Faith Acker, whose PhDs were recently approved. Their theses titles were: Dr Megan Hoffman, ‘Women Writing Women: Gender and Representation in British “Golden Age” Crime Fiction’; Dr Faith Acker, ‘“New-found methods and . . . compounds strange”: Reading the 1640 Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.’

Current postgraduate Claudia Daventry’s ‘Alakazam’ has just won the prestigeous 2012 Bridport Poetry Prize for 2012. The Prize was judged by Gwyneth Lewis, who remarked that ‘“Alakazam” stood out as a winner from my first reading. Here is a poet who is confident enough to pull off a conjuring trick, with the necessary delight for the reader.’ A full list of the winners, and Gwyneth Lewis’s report on the poetry competion (and more on Claudia’s winning poem), can be found on the Bridport’s website.

Verita Sriratana will be interviewing the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh at The Bharatasamay International Conference on Indian Writing in English, which will be held from 21 to 23 November 2012 at Chulalongkorn University.

Jessica Volz has an article featured in the October issue of The Jeweller (UK).

On 24 and 25 November, the School of English will host a one-and-a-half-day conference on E. M. Forster’s Maurice. With speakers coming from the UK, Europe, Africa, and the USA, the conference will mark the upcoming centenary of Forster's authorship of the novel. While the publication of Maurice in 1971 significantly changed the direction of Forster criticism, the complicated formation, revision, and reception of the novel itself has so far remained under-discussed. This conference aims to bring together scholars from various disciplines to (re)consider Maurice, examining as well as reading beyond its sexual politics. The conference organisers are PhD candidate Tsung-Han Tsai, assisted by fellow PhD candidates Lisa Griffin and Anna Watson, with Dr Emma Sutton and Prof Gill Plain. Keynote speakers are Dr Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Professor David Medalie (University of Pretoria). Further details can be found on the conference website.