Department of English Studies
Postgraduate Applicants
Current Postgraduate Research
Doctoral Students |
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Safaa Abdulsalam Abdulrahim |
Mike Askew |
James Bell |
Gary Cape |
Thomas Christie |
Peter Connelly |
Steven Craig |
Sharon Deans |
Claire Fabbri |
Anna Fenge |
William David Floyd |
Matthew Foley |
Elizabeth Fuller |
Georges Kieffer |
Christina Leigh |
Barbara Leonardi |
Jonathan Maxwell |
Neil McRobert |
Marguerite Nesling |
Linda Ogston |
Stuart O'Donnell |
Kerstin Pfeiffer |
Allan Rae |
Brian Rock |
Aspasia Stephanou |
Tirzah Zachariah |
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James Bell
Email: j.j.bell@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr. Dale Townshend
Title of Dissertation:- Gaston Leroux and the Phantom of the Opera: Prehistory, Birth and Afterlife.
Short description of dissertation:-
This thesis aims to provide a critical account of Gaston Leroux's Le fantome de l'Opera (1910) which, like Dracula (1897), has become one of western culture's most enduring myths. In common with Stoker's novel, Leroux's text discloses anxieties about a rapidly changing world. Artistically, these anxieties manifest themselves in a simultaneous fascination and horror with the emerging episteme. Further, if Leroux’s text is a summation of the Gothic (as Hogle claims), it nevertheless also represents its deconstruction. There are strong grounds for reading Le fantome de l’Opera as an anti-Gothic anti-romance.
The focus of this thesis is not only the primary text, but also its afterlife within popular culture. The manifold theatrical and filmic adaptations are obvious examples, but there are also literary and even political appropriations to consider. Clearly, the story has become become a modern myth of sorts, taking on a life independent of the ur-text.
I am indebted not only to Foucault, but also to aspects of New Historicism, not least its endeavours to subvert the traditional critical distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture. This thesis draws upon texts from operas to graphic novels, and treats them all primarily as cultural artifacts.
Publications:
'Dandyism, Decadence and Aestheticism in The Vampire Chronicles', Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, volume 17 issue 3
Conference Papers: ‘“Gott ist tot”: Tanz der Vampire and the Postmodern Undead’. Presented at Globalgothic: Technology, Media, Horror Postgraduate Symposium. University of Stirling, 5-6 December 2008
Awards:
2-year departmental bursary
Gary Cape
Email: gary.cape@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Scott Hames
Title of dissertation: Scotland’s Black Atlantic: Narrating Diaspora and
Reconstructing a Modern Nation
Short description of dissertation:
My thesis examines how responses to, and reconstructions of, Scottish Black Atlantic narratives are integral to the shaping of Scottish national identity within and against British imperialism, and how these texts may be situated in contemporary theoretical and political contexts of devolution. By examining 18th- and early 19th-Century newspapers, journals, life-writing, broadsides, chapbooks and legal papers alongside traditional literary sources, my textual research offers a historically comparative perspective on Scotland’s imperial past and post-British present, viewing Scotland as a vital location of diasporan cultural politics. What are the textual features of racial and civic belonging in Scottish Enlightenment culture, and how might these texts inform contemporary formulations of Black British and Caribbean culture? How do the theoretical and political contexts of devolution and diaspora help us assess imperial legacies in Scottish writing?
Awards:
AHRC Doctoral Award
1 Year Departmental bursary (Declined)
Thomas Christie
Email: t.a.christie@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Scott Hames
Title of Dissertation: Ideology, Genre and National Identity in Popular Scottish Fiction, 1975-2006
Short description of dissertation:
The aim of my research is to examine Scottish popular fiction of the stated period in order to explore the ways in which the themes dealt with in the popular genres of metaphysical fantasy, speculative fiction and crime fiction connect with or contradict the prominent themes being considered by authors of Scottish literary fiction at the time. I am investigating the degree to which the national political and cultural climate of the period under discussion informed the nature and style of such works, and am examining the manner in which, and the extent to which, a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction throughout the course of this timeframe.
Publications:
John Hughes and the Cinema of the Eighties (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2009) [Forthcoming].
‘Notes on Heart of Darkness’, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2009 [1895]) [Forthcoming].
‘A Scanner Darkly’, in Blade Runner and the Cinema of Philip K. Dick, ed. by Jeremy Mark Robinson (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2009) [Forthcoming].
The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008).
Liv Tyler, Star in Ascendance: Her First Decade in Film (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2007).
Conference papers:
‘Nothing Reel Exists?: Richard Linklater and Changing Interpretations of American Hegemony’, for the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium in Postcolonial Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling, 26 April 2008.
‘Liv Tyler in Modern Film and Popular Culture’, for Off the Page: The Stirling Book Festival 2007, The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, 28 September 2007.
Peter Connelly
Email: p.j.connelly@stir.ac.uk;
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Title of dissertation: Murderous Memes?: A Genealogy of ‘Serial Killing’ from Romanticism to Postmodernism
Short description of dissertation:
In this thesis I intend to create a genealogy of serial homicide narratives from Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Harris and beyond, focussing on discourses of monstrosity, subjectivity and otherness. I will be examining serial killing vis-à-vis interpretational shifts in explaining their acts: aesthetic, psychopathological, sociobiological, moral/religious/supernatural, and the ideological implications of these shifts, as well as the serial-killer appropriated as role model. I intend to explore how narratives of repeat killing reiterate or subvert consensus opinions of acceptable behaviour. I will be focussing initially on Romantic ideas of the self, and in the relationship between the ‘outsider’ artist/poet and the textual emergence of the figure of the solitary ‘serial’ murderer in the early nineteenth century, particularly in relation to De Quincey’s aesthetic murder essays. Subsequent fluctuations of serial killing between mental-health and law and order discourses will be examined in relation to underpinning social and political ideologies. I will also being exploring meme-theory as an explanatory model for approaching questions dealing with the popularity of, and fascination with, repeat killers, especially in relation to the current (re-) emergence of the search for socio-biological explanations in this field.
Awards:
AHRC Doctoral Award
Steven Craig
Email: steven.craig1@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Dale Townshend
Title of dissertation: ‘Our Gothic Bard’: Shakespeare and Appropriation, from Enlightenment to Romantic
Short description of dissertation:
My research will focus on Gothic appropriations of Shakespeare during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. While writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe will be considered via Gothic paradigms that privilege national, political and supernatural distinctions, the thesis will also engage with these writers within the context of burgeoning critical interest in the topic of ‘appropriation’ in literature in English.
Publications:
‘Shakespeare Among the Goths’, in Gothic Shakespeares. Edited by John Drakakis and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2008.
Conference papers:
‘Reverend Maturin’s Gothic Families’. Paper presented to Eighteenth-Century Gothic, University of Sheffield, October 2008.
Awards:
3-year University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary
AHRC Doctoral Award 2007-2009.
Sharon Deans
Email:- sharon.deans@students.stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Title of dissertation: Dissolution and Reconstitution: Richard Marsh, Arthur Machen and the Fin-de-Siècle Gothic
Short description of dissertation: Teen Gothic
An investigation into what happens to the Gothic mode in the gap between young children’s literature and adult fiction.
Awards:
University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2008/2009
Claire Fabbri
Email: claire.fabbri@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Dale Townshend
Title of dissertation: Shifting Vision in the Novels of Graham Swift
Anna Fenge
Email: alf3@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Adrian Hunter
Title of dissertation: Antagonistic Modernists
Short description of dissertation:
My research investigates modernists who do not sit comfortably with the canon or with current critical approaches. Centring on the work of Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Lawrence Durrell, I seek to propose a re-reading of these marginalised writers that positions them as antagonistic to modernism.
Conference papers
Dorothy Richardson Misses the High Modernist Ball (Exploding the Canon, Stirling University Postgraduate Conference May 2008)
Awards:
1-year Departmental Bursary
Sir Richard Stapley Trust Award 2008
Thomas and Margaret Roddan Trust Award 2008
David Floyd
Email: - w.d.floyd@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor:- Professor Glennis Byron
Title of Dissertation:- The Wretch in the Hovel: Exiles and Outcasts in Late Victorian Gothic Fiction
Short description of dissertation:-
My dissertation is an examination of exile and outcast figures in late Victorian Gothic fiction, particularly in relation to the provisional family or social structures they either create, assimilate into, or destroy. I firstly examine the role of family structure in Victorian fin-de-siecle society, emphasizing its role as a space of uniformity, tradition, and reliability in a period marked by mutability, incredulity, and uncertainty. I also create a psychological model to serve as a kind of gauge by which to consider various literary characters. I contrast this with a consideration of the various anxieties affecting late Victorian society and their threat to social stability. My first literary focus is on exiles of fragmentary natures and the manner in which they mimic other multi-faceted, but considerably more stable, characters in an effort to become part of a social construction. Next, I consider outcasts who are similarly erratic, but who deny the possibility of familial inclusion and seek to destroy the society they rebuke. I then concentrate on malleable outcast forms in the context of imperial literature, focusing on ideas of degeneration and reverse colonization. Next, I examine fragmentary exilic forms who are products of self-indulgent creator-fathers who either disown or abuse their creations. Finally, I examine the endeavors of outcast children to forge provisional family structures in the arena of alternate worlds, with particular emphasis on the spectrality of their mother figures. The dissertation concludes with a summation of my findings, attempting to answer the overall question as to why the outcast is so prevalent a figure in late Victorian literature, and what meanings this figure is used to generate.
Publications:-
“Ludicrous Accoutrement: Gothic Instability in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” The Journal of the Georgia Philological Association, 2008.
“ ‘Turn, Traitor Untrew’: Altering Arthur and Mordred in the Alliterative Morte Arthure”. Medieval Forum, Vol. 5, 2006. <http://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/.
“Ishmael’s Reads: Ishmael Reed’s Dispatches From the Front.” Mosaic: An African-American Literary Site. <www.conseula.com (forthcoming).
Contributor, “A Toni Morrison Annotated Bibliography”. Temples for Tomorrow. <www.conseula.com (forthcoming).
Conference Papers:
- “Spectral Mothers, Alternate Realms: Gothic Families in Alice, Peter Pan, and The Secret Garden.” The International Gothic Association Conference, Lancaster University, July 2009.
- “ ‘It Was On The Dark Side of Twilight:’ Stoker’s Fiction and the Fin-de-siecle.” Philological Association of the Carolinas Conference, Myrtle Beach, SC, March 2009.
- “ ‘Suffer Me To Go My Own Dark Way’: Intrusive Fathers and Rebellious Sons in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Brewton-Parker College, Mt Vernon, GA, March 2008.
- “The (De)construction of Renfield: Character Transference in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Philological Association of the Carolinas Conference, Myrtle Beach, SC, March 2007.
- “Ghosts’ Walks: Spatial Reconstruction and the Restriction of Female Agency in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.” The Victorians Institute, Converse College, October, 2006.
- “Heavenly Kingdoms: The Medieval Pearl as Social Criticism.” Philological Association of the Carolinas Conference, Winthrop University, March, 2006.
- “Reconciling Arthur and Mordred: Chanson de Geste in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Philological Association of the Carolinas Conference, Myrtle Beach, SC, March 2005.
Awards:
1 Year Departmental Bursary
Matthew Foley
Email:- m.r.foley@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor:- Dr Dale Townshend
Title of Dissertation:- Haunting Modernisms: Manifestation of the Spectral and the Apparitional in Modernist Literature (1919-1938).
Short description of dissertation:
My thesis provides a fresh theoretical (Derrida, Freud, Kristeva) reading of haunting in canonical interwar modernist literature. Writers under consideration include Lawrence, Barnes, Eliot, Woolf and Bowen.
Conference papers:
‘Exorcising the Ethical Apparition in Modernism’. Paper presented to the “Scottish Network of Modernist Scholars”meeting at the University of Stirling,January 2010.
‘Freudian Time and The Haunting of Woolf’s Protagonists’. Paper presented to the “Looking Back on the End of Time: Modernism and Beyond” conference at the University of East Anglia, September 2009.
Publications:
Awards:-
Internal Doctoral Award: 2008, 2009
Elizabeth Fuller
Email: e.a.fuller@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Adrian Hunter
Preliminary title of dissertation: Love on the Couch: Therapy, the Companionate Couple, and Imprisonment
Short description of dissertation:
I am looking at committed couples in contemporary British and American women’s fiction. I am particularly interested in how the couple is affected by changed/changing gender roles, increasing focus on work as the definition of who one is, and the isolation of the family/couple that fears outsiders and resents insiders.
Awards:
Overseas Research Students Award (ORSAS)
Georges Kieffer
Email: g.f.kieffer@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Scott Hames
Title of dissertation: Representations of Education in the Work of Modern Scottish Novelists
Jonathan Maxwell
Email: j.r.maxwell@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Ruth Evans
Title of dissertation: Stealing Shakespeare: The Appropriation of Literary Tradition by Twentieth-Century Writers
Short description of dissertation:
In my research I am examining the ways in which twentieth-century authors revisit and appropriate canonical texts. The central questions of my thesis are: why is the use of appropriation increasingly prevalent when texts constructed in this way are often viewed as suspect and of secondary importance, and what is the cultural meaning and cultural value of this appropriation and the ‘new’ texts that are born as a result in a world where technology both vies for dominance over literature and enables new forms of literary production and consumption?
Conference papers:
‘Love’s Labour’s Hijacked’: The Appropriation of Shakespeare by Doctor Who’. Paper presented at the 3rd annual Association of Literature on Screen Conference, Amsterdam, September 2008.
‘The Screen Within the Screen: Representations of Television in the BBC’s Shakespeare Retold Season’. Paper presented at Exploding The Canon Conference, University of Stirling, May 2008.
‘Jay-Z vs. The Beatles: Intratextual Dynamics in The Grey Album’. Paper presented at Exploding The Canon Conference, University of Stirling, May 2008.
‘Shakespeare/Internet: Slash Fiction and the Shakespeare Pairings List That Ate Academia’. Paper presented to Retelling Tales Conference, University of Stirling, May 2007.
‘Does Sherlock Holmes have Asperger’s Syndrome?: The role of illustrations in the detective fiction of Conan Doyle and Haddon’. Paper presented to Intertexuality: Conversations Between the Sheets Conference, University of Tulsa, March 2007.
Awards:
University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2006-2007
AHRC Doctoral Award 2007-2009
Barbara Leonardi
Email: barbara.leonardi@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Suzanne Gilbert
Title of dissertation: The Pragmatics of Gender Interaction in the Work of James Hogg
Short description of dissertation:
The thesis aims to investigate Hogg’s representation of gender and its relation to the emerging discourses of empire in early-ninetenth-century Britain, using literary pragmatics, a linguistic approach concerned with the analysis of voices. It will therefore investigate female and male voices starting from the pragmatic assumption that author, narrator, characters, and readers have voices that dialogically interact with one another for the duration of the text. Hogg uses gender interaction to explore and expose the contradictions of grand narratives, by presenting alternative voices that destabilise the binary oppositions that order both gender and empire. The thesis will also investigate Hogg’s use of parody from a Bakhtinian perspective, especially in relation to the management of voices, in order to reveal the limits of the British enterprise and elucidate the political and social forces of the imperial discourse.
Publications:
Conference papers:
Awards:
University\Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2009-2010
Marguerite Nesling
Email: marguerite.neslingi@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Suzanne Gilbert
Preliminary title: The novels of John Galt
Short description of dissertation:
The aim of the research is to recover John Galt’s status as a key figure in nineteenth-century Scottish fiction by re-establishing his credentials as a social commentator on late eighteenth-century Scotland.
Publications:
Conference papers:
Awards:
University\Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2009-2010
Stuart O’Donnell
Email: s.w.odonnell@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Suzanne Gilbert
Preliminary title of dissertation: Hogg, Orality and Print Culture: A Comparative Study
Short description of dissertation:
With Scottish author James Hogg as focal point, this project will explore a key moment in the relationship between oral tradition and literary culture. In early-nineteenth-century Scotland Hogg scrutinised, dramatized and embodied the merging of oral and written culture through his deployment of folk and oral elements in his writings. His treatment of this process, however, is often analysed only at the national level, with culturally-specific implications; yet inthe period 1800-1840 many writers from various cultures, including Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol in Russia and Nathaniel Hawthorne in America, were likewise incorporating oral elements into their fiction. Like Hogg, these writers depicted, analysed and questioned the relationship between oral tradition and the increasingly dominant print culture of the period. I will thus attempt to locate Hogg’s treatment of the relationship between oral and written culture within an international context by comparing how, why, and to what effect, the different writers manipulated these disparate forms.
Awards:
Other Professional Activities:
Linda Ogston
Email: linda.ogston@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor’s name: Professor Glennis Byron
Title of dissertation: New Shades of Grey: The Clone as a Gothic Trope in Speculative Fiction
Short description of dissertation:
My thesis will explore the issue of cloning within contemporary literature and film. It will consider this from the perspective of the Gothic, exploring such themes as the double, monstrosity and the family and considering to what extent the clone can be viewed as a Gothic trope.
Publications
(Co-written with Glennis Byron) ‘Educating Kathy: Clones and Other Creatures in Never Let Me Go’ in 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. Edited by Danel Olson. (forthcoming).
Kerstin Pfeiffer
Email: kerstin.pfeiffer@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Stephen Penn
Title of dissertation: Passionate Encounters: Mechanisms of Emotional Engagement in Middle English Religious Drama
Short description of dissertation:
The late medieval church encouraged emotionalism as a healthy inward reaction to devotional representations. Yet Middle English plays that stage sacred history were sometimes condemned as blasphemous and dangerous by orthodox and heterodox thinkers alike due to their capacity to evoke strong emotions in their audiences. My research is particularly interested in how the performative aspects of scriptural drama contributed to its emotionality. In my thesis, I examine the ways in which Middle English plays seek to inscribe doctrinally and devotionally relevant signs and bodies with emotional significance for their audiences in order to ensure the didactic efficacy of the performance. Central to my thesis are psychological considerations of the role of emotions and sensual perception in cognition in medieval faculty psychology as well as modern neuropsychological research.
Publications:
Book reviews
Rev. of Eating Beauty. The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages, by Ann W. Astell, in Literature and Theology 22.2 (2008), 239-241.Rev. of Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, by John J. McGavin, in History Scotland 8.3 (2008), 56-8.
Rev. of Medieval Blood, by Bettina Bildhauer, in Literature and Theology 20.4 (2006), 475-477.
Rev. of Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend, by Richard F. Johnson, in Literature and Theology 20.4 (2006), 473-475.
Rev. of Angels and Earthly Creatures. Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages, by Claire M. Waters, Literature and Theology 20.2 (2006), 215- 217.
Encyclopedia entries
Entries on Mainzer Chronik, Siegfried von Bacharach, Breve Chonicon Austriacum, Chronicon Lippoldsbergense, Chronicon Schutterani monasterii, Chronik der Burgunderkriege, Chronik der Grafen von Bentheim, Chronica der graffen von Cilli, Chronik der Zeiten Abrechts II und Friedrichs III, Konrad Pfettisheim, Heinrich Steinruck, Caspar Weinreich, Frensweger Chronik, Ekkehard von Aura, Frutolf von Michelsberg in Dunphy, G. et al., eds, Brill’s Encyclopedia of Medieval Chronicles, Leyden: Brill, forthcoming 2009.
Various book reviews for Literature and Theology and History Scotland
Conference papers:
'Once seen, never forgotten. The affective dimension of medieval Crucifixion plays'. Paper presented to The Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity conference, Umeå University, October 2008 '
‘Staged interpretations: exegesis and the question of representation in late medieval religious drama’, paper presented to ‘Translating Christianity: A Colloquium’, University of Stirling
‘A Passion for Drama - Thoughts on the Affective Strategies of Religious Drama in Late Medieval England.’ Paper presented to the Medieval Emotions conference, Princeton University, New Jersey, March 2007.
‘‘Þou shalt be clad in clothys newe” - Dressing the medieval sinner in The Castle of Perseverance’. Paper presented to the Fashioning Fiction Conference, University of Stirling, May 2006.
Awards:
Funds for Women Graduates main grant, 2009-2010
1-year Departmental bursary, 2004-2005.
Other Professional Activities
Peer reviewer for Literature and Theology; member of ‘Translating Christianities ‘ research group, SLCR, University of Stirling; freelance translator
Allan Rae
Email: allan.rae@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor David Richards
Title of Dissertation: Content Voids: Postmodernism and Mourning
Short description of dissertation:
I am interested in the cultural and theoretical status of postmodernism. I would like to investigate what I believe is a revival of the ethical terms which all but disappeared in the heyday of postmodernism. I postulate that the act of mourning must now count as an ethical act for postmodernists. What would now constitute a site of mourning in postmodern culture? My thesis will work through this question by positing that such a site is what I will term a 'content void' – a spatialised site which nevertheless appears to escape the possibility of its thematisation as a point also in time, and therefore a place where 'content' cannot exist as a form available for narration. Narration figures not just literally but culturally in my thesis: postmodern approaches to mourning are the best example of a culture which has grown so sceptical of narrative inclusiveness that no monument can be erected as a memorial (for example at Ground Zero in New York.) My thesis will attempt to show that the figure of the 'content void' resounds throughout postmodernism, and that this figure presages the introduction of the new digital forms implicit in the computerisation of society.
Awards:
1 Year Departmental Bursary
Brian Rock
Email: brian.rock@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor David Richards
Title of dissertation: ‘Towards a Minor Literature’: the writings of Brian O’Nolan
Short description of dissertation:
This research project contributes to the growing field of minority discourse studies pioneered by Deleuze and Guattari to fully engage with the concepts of ‘minor’ and ‘major’ writing. Through a study of the Irish writer Brian O’Nolan’s novels and journalism, and by introducing Ireland into the debate of minority discourse theory and postcolonialism, I raise the question of to what extent these concepts can adequately describe the Irish condition, and more specifically, O’Nolan’s work.
Publications:
‘The practice and effects of literary censorship in the Irish Free State 1929-46’, PAGES, University College Dublin, 2002.
Conference papers:
‘Directions in Irish postcolonial theory: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds’. Paper presented to Postgraduate Research Day, Royal Holloway London, July 2008.
‘Appropriating Sween(e)y: Authority and the Anglo-Irish Canon’. Paper presented to Exploding the Canon Conference, University of Stirling, May 2008.
‘Problems with identifying the postcolonial status of Flann O’Brien’. Paper presented to the Postgraduate Symposium in Postcolonial Studies, University of Stirling, April 2008.
‘Subaltern politics and metafiction in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds’. Paper presented to Crosscurrents Conference, University of Strathclyde, April 2008.
‘Poetics of defamiliarisation: a comparative reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman'. Paper presented to Contemporary Encounters: Africa and Europe Conference, University of Basel, July 2007.
‘Voicing the marginalised Irish working class in the texts of Flann O'Brien’. Paper presented to InVisibilities: Absence and Presence on Cultural Texts and Images Conference, University of Dundee, June 2007.
‘Defying generic empiricism: hybridity and ambiguity in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories’. Paper presented to the Retelling Tales Conference, University of Stirling, May 2007.
‘Representations from the Celtic Twilight: Irish gender and sexuality in the Irish Free State’. Paper presented to Gender and Sexualities Conference, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, May 2004.
Awards:
3-year University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary
Aspasia Stephanou
Email: aspasia.stephanou@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Short description of dissertation:
In postmodernity ideas about identity and subjectivity are constantly mutating and redefining. Within this framework, my project will argue that the contemporary vampire has become the central locus for investigating these questions. I intend to examine the connections between vampire literature and vampire subcultures, focusing on their shared preoccupation with identity. The juxtaposition of literature and subculture, the fascination of postmodern culture with the high and low, with plurality, will offer me the opportunity to expand my discussion about identity in diverse areas such as: existentialism, cyborgs, performance art, fashion, sexuality, gender, race, sadomasochism, monstrosity, blood and music. By exploring the different manifestations of identity and postmodern subjectivity, I will show why identity is one of the main factors responsible for the enduring popularity of vampire literature and what connects vampire subcultures to some of the central concerns of contemporary society.
Masters Students
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