Dr Lorna Burns has been appointed to the School as a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures. Lorna joins St Andrews from the University of Lincoln where she was a Lecturer in English and she is a past Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of the monograph Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2012), and has co-edited a volume with Birgit Kaiser of Utrecht University, Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave, 2012).

 Dr Jurate Levina takes up a post of Teaching Fellow in the School this month. Jurate’s research interests centre around phenomenology of literature and other arts, predominantly focusing on High Modernism. Her doctoral research, conducted at the University of York, examined the manifestations of T. S. Eliot’s concern with the tension between language and sensuous perception in his philosophical prose, criticism, and poetry. Jurate has published on Virginia Woolf and John Banville, and her translation of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare into Lithuanian came out in 2007 (Vilnius: Mintis). She has taught at Vilnius and York.

The 7 volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson was published in July. Professor Lorna Hutson edited for it Jonson’s posthumously published commonplace book, Timber, or Discoveries (1641), which is in volume 7 of the edition, and which features a new introduction, modernized text and the first extensive scholarly commentary on ‘Discoveries’ since 1952. Professor Hutson comments: ‘I hope this more accessible edition, with up-to-date scholarly commentary accessibly on the same page as Jonson’s text, will stimulate new understandings of an author who was demanding, erudite and transformative in his own time and can therefore tell us much about who we have become.’

Dr Jim Byatt has an article in the current issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies (July 2012, 48 (3)), called ‘Being Dead? Trauma and the Liminal Narrative in J. G. Ballard’s Crash and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’ (it is the first article in the issue).

Professor Susan Sellers has a contribution in the Arvon Book of Literary Non-fiction, published by Bloomsbury.

Professor Nicholas Roe will be Visiting Professor of English Literature at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, from 23 September to 6 October. While at Victoria University he will present a keynote lecture on Keats and Wordsworth at the ‘Romantic Voyagers – Voyaging Romantics’ Conference’.

Professor Robert Crawford is giving the nineteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture at Yale later this month. The lecture is entitled ‘Robert Burns and Scottish Independence’, further details here. He is also giving, with photographer Norman McBeath, one of the Franke Lectures at Yale, to accompany the ‘Simonides’ exhibition which will be showing at the Whitney Center for the Humanities this Fall semester. The ‘Simonides’ exhibition is one of the artistic commissions to mark the 600th anniversary of the founding of the University of St Andrews, and will be exhibited in full at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in 2013. Robert will go on from Yale to Harvard to research his biography of T. S. Eliot.

Dr Sara Lodge is an invited plenary speaker on 'Lear and Dissent' at the bicentenary Edward Lear Conference at the University of Oxford, on 22nd September.

Dr Sarah Dillon is appearing on BBC Radio Scotland's 'Book Café' on Monday 10th September to discuss the relationship between creativity and motherhood.

Professor Don Paterson hosted an Arvon course at Moniack Mhor on 20–25 August. Upcoming readings and talks include the University of Kent (27 September), Roehampton University Shakespeare symposium (20 October) and the University of East Anglia (10 November).

Over 70 delegates met in St Andrews from August 10th–12th for the ‘Emblems of Nationhood: Britishness 1707–1901’ conference, organised jointly between English (by recent PhDs Kristin Lindfield-Ott and Ros Powell), Modern Languages, Art History and History. The conference provided an opportunity for researchers and postgraduates from a wide variety of disciplines to come together to discuss the issues of Britishness, British identity and foreign perceptions of Britain. Speakers from several disciplines, and from as far afield as New Zealand, Japan and Korea, contributed to a wide variety of papers, topics and discussions, covering History, Archaeology, Landscape Design, Orientalism, Music, Art History, Decorative Arts, Painting, Sculpture, Literature (both from within the British Isles and from elsewhere in the world), and Geography. Keynote papers were given by Prof. Calum Colvin (Duncan of Jordanstone, University of Dundee), Prof. Colin Kidd (Belfast, now St Andrews) and Prof. Linda Colley (Princeton).

Dr Sarah Dillon organised a two-day conference on novelist Maggie Gee in the School at the end of August. Maggie Gee read from her writing and took part in a Q&A. The conference was part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series, of which Dr Dillon is an editor. The Keynote Speakers were Maggie Gee, Dr John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) and Professor Susan Alice Fischer (The City University of New York, US).

Verita Sriratana will be speaking on ‘“When life is haunted, not by Death in the fullness of time, but by Death’s fast-encroaching shadow”: Dismembering/Re(-)membering Life and Death in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth”’ at In the Footsteps of Katherine Mansfield International Symposium. This symposium is hosted by the British Residents Association, the English Department of the University of Geneva and the Katherine Mansfield Society. It will be held at Crans-Montana, Switzerland, from 22 to 23 September.

Jennifer Key has been awarded a grant from Funds for Women Graduates. The grant will provide support while she completes her thesis on 'Representations of Death and Dying in Anglo-Saxon Hagiography.'

In this new role, Ben will coordinate modules in contemporary literature and twentieth-century avant-garde fiction, as well as contribute to courses in crime writing, literary history and literary theory. Ben has also been invited to participate in a special on-line ‘Periscope’ dossier of the journal Social Text on Elizabeth Freeman’s 'Time Binds' (Duke University Press, 2010). The project will involve a number of responses to 'Time Binds', to which Elizabeth Freeman will in turn respond.