Literature and Languages
Current Postgraduates
Postgraduate Research
Doctoral Students |
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Safaa Abdulsalam Abdulrahim |
James Campbell |
Daniel Cummins |
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Peter Connelly |
Steven Craig |
Sharon Deans |
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Anna Fenge |
William David Floyd |
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Christina Leigh |
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Barbara Leonardi |
Stuart Lindsay |
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Marguerite Nesling |
Linda Ogston |
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Stuart O'Donnell |
Allan Rae |
Aspasia Stephanou |
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Neil Syme |
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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:
The Christmas Movie Book (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2011) [Forthcoming].
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: The Pocket Movie Guide (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2010).
John Hughes and Eighties Cinema: Teenage Hopes and American Dreams (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2009).
‘A Scanner Darkly’, in Blade Runner and the Cinema of Philip K. Dick, edited by Jeremy Mark Robinson (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008).
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).
For further details of the above publications, please visit my website
Conference papers:
‘The Thistle in the Ashes: A Very Scottish Apocalypse’, for the Transgression and Its Limits Conference, University of Stirling, Stirling, 29 May 2010.
‘A Brief History of the Christmas Film’, for The Brush with the Bible Lecture Season, The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, 17 December 2009.
‘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.
‘Global Concerns, Independent Minds: National Identities and International Ideologies’, for the School of Postcolonial Studies Workshop, University of Stirling, Stirling, 7 November 2007.
‘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
Ada Fairfax-Lovelace
Email:- ada.fairfaxlovelace@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Short description of dissertation:
This thesis aims to re-evaluate the role of the animal in fin de siècle Gothic fiction by thoroughly engaging with the establishment of the SPCA in 1824 (Royal in 1840), and the entailing development of animal welfare and animal ethics.
Publications:
Ada Lovelace 2008, ‘Ghostly and Monstrous Manifestations of Women: Edo to Contemporary’
The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5, 2.
Awards:
Carnegie Vacation Scholarship, 2008 University of Stirling/Departmental Postgraduate bursary, 2009-2010 Horizon Studentship Award for Postgraduate Research, 2010-2013
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)
Siobhan Higgins
Email: s.l.higgins@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Adrian Hunter
Preliminary title of dissertation: Post-War American Short Fiction: Gender Politics in Relation to Publishing Context
Short description of dissertation:
The aim of this research is to investigate the way in which post-war cultureand cold-war ideology affects the form of the short story in certain American magazines, such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and how this relationship manifests itself in the expression of gender identity by writers such as Updike, Cheever, Oates and Munro. It aims to explore the American short story in its particular physical context and how it exists in a cycle of cultural production where editorial policy shapes both the writer’s work and the interests of the reader.
Awards:
Department Bursary 2010-2011
Charles and Barbara Tyre Trust Award 2009-2011
Georges Kieffer - MPhil in English
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: Dr Scott Hames
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
Meghan McAvoy
Email:- meghan.mcavoy@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Scott Hames
Short description of dissertation:
My project examines the limits of predominant nationalist readings of recent Scottish literature, interrogating the claims made for Scottish writing which focus around conceptions of 'authenticity' and 'Scottishness', and exploring alternative critical contexts in which Scottish literature might be read. Under consideration is work by James Kelman, Douglas Dunn, Janice Galloway and Iain Crichton Smith.
Publications:
“The extra-semantic kinetics/ uv the fuckin poor”: Profanity, Education and the Establishment in Recent Scottish Writing, Transgression and Its Limits conference proceedings (forthcoming).
Awards:
Carnegie Vacation Scholarship, 2008
AHRC Research Preparation Master's Award 2009-2010 Horizon Studentship Award for Postgraduate Research, 2010-2013
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 investigates the representation of gender in its dynamics with class and ethnicity in the work of Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835). Through controversial characters such as prostitutes, outspoken servants, and anti-heroic-picaresque characters, Hogg emphasised stereotypes of gender and language in order to show the social contradictions at the heart of empire formation in early-ninetenth-century Britain. Hogg’s methods, however, provoked charges of ‘indelicacy’ by members of the Edinburgh literary elite who perceived him as a subversive voice. Enriching Bakhtin’s carnivalesque heteroglossia with a more dynamic literary-pragmatic perspective, the thesis aims to investigate how the wider imperial historical context contributed to gender construction and deconstruction in Hogg’s work. The thesis will consider the pragmatics of literary communication, viewing the text as a verbal performance in print where author, reader, and characters have voices, in order to illuminate why and how Hogg’s writing challenged the stability of British discourse.
Publications:
‘The Pragmatics of Literary Interaction in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, in Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching, Vol. 5 (2011), free access online at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/pgconference/v05.htm
'James Hogg, 'Basil Lee', and the Pragmatics of Highland Masculinity', in NAWA: Journal of Language and Communication, Vol. 6, No 1, forthcoming June 2012; an earlier non peer-reviewed version can be retrieved at http://www.pala.ac.uk/resources/proceedings/2011/leonardi2011.pdf
‘James Hogg, the Three Perils, and the Pragmatics of Bourgeois Marriage’, in Studies in Hogg and His World, No 23 (forthcoming spring 2012)
Conference papers:
Symposium on Literature as Communication, at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, 2nd – 3rd September 2011, paper title: ‘James Hogg and the Pragmatics of Cross-Dressing Women’.
12th International Biennial Conference of British Association for Romantic Studies — Enlightenment, Romanticism & Nation — University of Glasgow, 28 – 31 July 2011, paper title: ‘James Hogg and the Parody of Scottish Hyper-Masculinity’.
PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) Conference Namibia —Language and Literature Interface: Contemporary Perspectives — 4 – 8 July 2011, Polytechnic of Namibia, Windhoek, paper title: ‘James Hogg and the Pragmatics of Highland Masculinity’, conference expenses funded by the PALA Roger Fowler Funding
James Hogg's Borders Conference, hosted by the James Hogg Society and
The Department of Literature, July 14-17, 2010, University of Konstanz, Germany, paper title: ‘James Hogg, Gender, and the Trope of Marriage’.
The Fifth Lancaster Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and English Language, July 5, 2010, Lancaster University, UK, paper title: ‘A Literary-Pragmatic Approach to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’.
‘Half Dust Half Deity’: Science, Nature and the Supernatural in the Long Eighteenth Century, 24th-25th April 2010, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK, paper title: ‘The Magic World of The Three Perils of Man: James Hogg’s Introjection of the Scottish Supernatural Tradition’.
Awards:
2-year University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary (2009-2011), University of Stirling, UK.
AHRC Doctoral Award 2010-2012.
Stuart Lindsay
Email: s.l.lindsay@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Title of dissertation:A Monument to the Gothic: Chernobyl, Internationalism and the Post-Communist Landscape
Short description of dissertation:
I am currently researching my PhD in Communist and Post-Communist Science Fiction, and its relationship with pan-national and digital Gothic, which I am due to start in October 2010. In it, I'm going to be analysing the history of 20th century abuse of Communist social power documented through literature and film, its language and traditions of trauma, and the gothicizisation of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. I will then look at how this reconstruction of the disaster, itself a monument of transition between Communism and Post-Communism, is disseminated into popular and global culture, and how it attracts and influences Gothic narratives in technological wastelands, science fiction and survival horror.
I'm also interested in 18th century nationalism, cyberpunk, and the way in which videogames interact with the Gothic and provide new ways of storytelling and exercising gothic conventions.
Publications
Contemporary Cyber Gothic Videogame Culture: The Feminine Sublime In System Shock 2. I am to present a paper on the phenomenon of Urban Exploration at next year's IGA Conference in August.
Awards
Horizon Studentship Award for Postgraduate Research
Neil McRobert
Email: n.a.mcrobert@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Glennis Byron
Title of Thesis: Gothic Metafiction and the Crisis of Contemporary Narrative.
Short description of dissertation:
My thesis examines the intersection of Postmodernism and the Gothic. In particular I am interested in the metafictional properties of contemporary Gothic. Whilst the Gothic has always been a particularly self-aware genre, recent works have foregrounded the act of reading and writing to an unprecedented level. I examine texts by Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Z. Danielewskiand Margaret Atwood, amongst others, to suggest that the Gothic's current metafictional agenda provides an apt metaphor for thecurrent political condition by emphasising the significance of narrative to the structuring of experience and information.
Publications:
'Lost Souls: Robert M. McCammon',IrishJournal of Gothic and Horror Studies8.
'Shoot Everything that Moves: Contemporary Zombie Cinema and the War on Terror', Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations(Forthcoming)
Awards:
Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2010/11
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:
‘Enlightened superstition: The supernatural in James Hogg and John Galt’. Paper presented to ‘James Hogg's Borders’, conference hosted by the James Hogg Society and the Department of Literature, University of Konstanz, Germany, July 14–17, 2010
‘Eerie theory: The supernatural in John Galt’s The Spaewife and The Omen’. Paper presented to 'Half Dust, Half Deity; or, Science, Nature and the Supernatural in the Long Eighteenth Century', Annual Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Graduate Conference, University of Cambridge, 24–25 April 2010>>
Awards:
University/Departmental Doctoral Bursary 2009–2010, 2010–2011
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
‘Feeling the Passion: Neuropsychological Perspectives on Passion Plays’, submitted to postmedieval 19 entries on Middle High German and Latin Chronicles in Dunphy, G. et al., eds, Brill’s Encyclopedia of Medieval Chronicles, Leyden: Brill, 2010.
Various book reviews for Literature and Theology and History Scotland
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:
‘Minding the Passion’. Paper presented to the 17th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, Siena, July 2010
‘The Importance of Seeing “bitere teris”: Middle English Passion Plays and Theories of Sharing Emotions’. Paper presented to the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, USA, May 2010
'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, May 2008
‘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
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.
Tirzah Zachariah
Email: t.z.zachariahomar@stir.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr David Murphy (temporary)