News and events archive - January 2013
School welcomes Dr Christina Alt
Dr Christina Alt has been appointed to a lectureship in Twentieth-Century Literature in the School of English. She joins St Andrews from the University of Sydney, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow.
Her research focuses on exchanges between literature and science resulting from the concurrent rise of literary modernism and the science of ecology. Her teaching and research interests include literature and science studies, ecocriticism, and material culture studies. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge UP, 2010).
Keats' biography voted best book of 2012
Professor Nicholas Roe's John Keats: A New Life was nominated a best book of 2012 by Sir Andrew Motion in The Guardian and by Matthew Sweet on the BBC 2 Review Show.
To read Sir Andrew Motion's review of the book click here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/21/john-keats-opium-addict
To hear the Review Show discussion of John Keats, click here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pbj11
Publications
Publications from Professors John Burnside and Susan Sellers.
Professor John Burnside's collection of stories, Something Like Happy, is published this month by Jonathan Cape. The stories take the reader into the lives of trapped men and women - lonely, unfaithful, dying - people for whom happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong only to dream or children's fable. In each of these normal yet damaged lives something extraordinary is nevertheless revealed: a dogged belief in a hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.
Professor Susan Sellers has published a discussion piece with writer Alice Thompson in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, published by Palgrave Macmillan. From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith, this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years.
Professor Paterson in Cambridge University museum 'renaissance'
Professor Don Paterson will be poet in residence in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science as part of a museum 'renaissance' organised by the University of Cambridge in conjunction with poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Don will join nine other poets each of whom will have a two-week residency in different museums belonging to Cambridge University. For more information please follow this link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/02/cambridge-university-museums-poetry-renaissance
Drs Tom Jones and Sarah Dillon win research funding
Drs Tom Jones and Sarah Dillon have recently had success with grant applications to the Carnegie Trust and the Royal Society of Edinburgh respectively.
Dr Dillon was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Small Research Grant to support the dissemination of the findings of her collaborative What Scientists Read project at the 2013 annual conferences of the British Society for Literature and Science and the Society for Science, Literature and the Arts (USA). The funding will also support a What Scientists Read public engagement event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival 2014.