The English Showcase

10:00 - Arrival and registration (with coffee and pastries)

10:30 - Welcome from Dr Joe Jackson, Director of Teaching for the School of English

10:45 - Panel 1 (Chair: Abigail Greaves)

Naama Alaboodi, 'Temporal Places and Permanent Space in Jean Rhys' Let Them Call It Jazz'
Khadiza Naznin Huda, 'The formation of identity through clothing and fashion in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable and Susanna Moore's One Last Look'
Yun-Sah Hsieh, 'From Mimics to Simulacra: Posthuman Pathos in Kazuo Ishigoro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and The Sun (2021)'
Amalia Costa, 'Venus as a Boy: Employing the Androgynous Gaze in Ali Smith's Hotel World, Boy Meets Girl and How To Be Both.'

11.45 - Panel 2 (Chair: Tom Fairfax)

Marie Georghiou, 'Bringing old texts to life: Translating a 1000 year-old riddle'.
Samuel Masters, 'The Divine Paradox: The Use of Paradox in English Devotional Lyrics from 1300-1600'.
Em Horne, 'An examination of the value of place-names as evidence for the history, landscape and, especially, the language(s) of the Lancashire coast'.
Jessica Corrigan, 'Reconstructing Patriarchal Norms in the Early Modern Forest'.

This panel will be followed by a 45 minute break for lunch.

13:30 - Panel 3 (Chair: Dr Christina Lee)

Katy Bagust-Jones, 'Cannot Lah: A comparison of the meaning and use of can and cannot in Singapore and British English'.
Minael Shahzadi, 'Representation and Interpretation in Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich's Ekphrastic Poetry.'
Emily Jones, ''For what could beauty's business be in Murphy's vicinity, if not with Murphy?' Fate and metafiction in Samuel Beckett's Murphy'.
Lauren Walker, 'Exploring Midlands attitudes towards regional linguistic variation in the UK and Ireland'.

14:30 - Panel 4 (Chair: Amanda Kale)

Abdulaziz Alhussan, 'The influence of the gamified-flipped approach on improving engagement and learning achievements'.
Jennifer Lea, 'Beyond the Archetype: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses code-switching to engage the electorate and defy expectations of powerful women.'
Beiting Zheng, 'Are we learning "Textbook English"? A corpus-based study of lexical bundles in English textbooks used in Chinese secondary schools'.
Xuewu Qin, 'Demographic study with Chinese high school deaf EFL learners - a case study with Wuhan No.1 deaf school'.

This panel will be followed by a 15 minute coffee break.

15:45 - Panel 5 (Chair: Molly Watson)

Daisy Twizell, 'The relationship between contemporary "Instapoets" and second-wave feminist poetry'.
Jacob Watkins, ''To Build the Universe Stupendous': What Lord Byron and Percy Shelley searched for in Strain'.
Alex Tyndall, 'A Disappointment to My Parents'.

This panel will be followed by closing remarks and a wine reception.

Full Programme

10:45 - Welcome from Professor Svenja Adolphs, Head of School for the School of English

11:00 - Identity and experience in fiction and poetry (Chair: Professor Jim Moran)

Emma Stirland, Logic of the Flesh: Touch in D.H. Lawrence's The Blind Man and You Touched Me
Amy Bouwer, 'I sing to you / from my place with my righteous kin': Judith Wright's Decolonial Poetics
Lucy Boynes, 'The sick voice inside her': The self and other dichotomy and gothic representations of mental illness in The Haunting of Hill House and Lighter Than My Shadow

This panel will be followed by a 15 minute break.

12:00 - Linguistic Identity Formation (Chair: Dr Helen Buckler)

Wirdatul Khasanah, It takes two to tango: But why woman always being blamed in infidelity?
Xinmei Sun, Sacrificing long hair and the domestic sphere: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of news reports on female medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in China
Ruth Serlin, 'After all, I'm only human': how veterinarians create a professional identity relating to animal euthanasia

This panel will be followed by an hour long break for lunch.

14:00 - Adapting form, creating fiction (Chair: Dr Christina Lee)

Michaela Villano, English and Italian Arthurian Medieval Romances from the 13th to the 15th Century: A Comparative Study
Lilith Lear Hudson, Technological Threats and the Metafictional Mode: Analysing Dystopias in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles (2016)
Joe Paternoster, 'God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!': Marvel's Thanos as a solution to the death of God in an increasingly secular Western world.
Simeon Cherepov, Out of site, out of mind: escaping from and into the occult in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

This panel will be followed by a 15 minute break.

15:15 - How its made: constructing language and literature (Chair: Dr Joe Jackson)

Noor Dabbas, 'Just Google It': A Cross-Corpus Study of Conversion and Cognitive Grammar
James Stevens, 'For you know only a heap of broken images': how does T.S. Eliot transform his presentation of disillusionment from manuscript to publication in The Waste Land
Anna Gant, 'The End is the Beginning': The 'What' and 'Whys' of Fanfiction in the Words of Those Who Are Both Fanficcers and Traditionally Published Writers

This panel will be followed by some closing remarks.

Full Programme

This event celebrates the research produced by final year undergraduates and by MA students, who were invited to present on any aspect of their work ranging from dissertations to essays and creative writing.

The day began with a keynote talk from  Jon McGregor, Professor of Creative Writing in the School and editor of our very own literary journal,  The Letters Page. Jon discussed his career, and his working practices; particularly the processes of writing. This was followed by a diverse range of papers with more than twenty students delivering presentations, providing a fantastic representation of work undertaken in the School.

Subjects that attendees could hear about included: how language reclamation was used on feminist protest signs from the 2017 Women’s March; swearing in Mandarin online; Afrofuturism in Anthony Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOS; and a feminist exploration of language and gender in adaptations and appropriations of Much Ado About Nothing. The ambition and enthusiasm demonstrated by participants was a great way to mark the end of term, and a wonderful culmination to the teaching year.

- Dr Lucie Sutherland, Assistant Professor, School of English