School of English

The English Showcase

A stylised white image of Trent Building at the University of Nottingham. Text: English Showcase 2021.

Overview

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The English Showcase celebrates the research produced by final-year undergraduate and masters students. 

Students from all disciplines in the school are invited to present any aspect of their work, ranging from dissertations to essays and creative writing.

Any questions? Email us

This year's Showcase will be held online on 16 June 2021. The Showcase will be held on Teams and is open to staff and students in the school of English.

The sessions will be recorded. If you can't make the day but would like access to the recorded sessions, please register to attend.

Register now

 

The English Showcase 2021 (16 June, Online)

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

Attend

Students and staff in the School of English can now register for the 2021 English Showcase!

Register now

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Past showcases 

Following the success of the first showcase in 2015, the school has made it an annual event. Read more about past events below:

2020

Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic no Showcase took place in 2020.

2019 

Find out more...

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

 

2018

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This year's Showcase event was held on Friday 23rd March

What a fantastic spectacle this year's Showcase was! Dr Daniel Hunt, Director of Undergraduate Studies opened up the event with a wonderful Welcome talk expressing what a great opportunity The English Showcase is for learning new things and sharing ideas. We couldn't agree more!

The line-up was certainly an impressive one whereby third year English with Creative Writing student, Tianna Johnson gave a very well received talk on 'Decolonising the Curriculum in Modern Cultural Identity in Literature' and ended with Andrea Bowd's, beautiful collection of poetries entitled, 'Panaceas' on the Creative/Critical panel. Thank you to all of our students, audience and staff for participating in and supporting this inspirational annual event.

Conference Booklet Download The English Showcase 2018 Programme

 

 
 

2017

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Proud of your work? #ShowOff17

This year's Showcase took place on Friday 7th April 2017.

Bigger than ever before, the full-day event included a diverse range of papers from fourteen speakers who were either Masters students or in their final year of Undergraduate study. Panel topics ranged from Shakespearean 'Filmic Legacies' and 'Character Interactions' to 'The Politics of Space and Things', 'The Use and Abuse of Language', and 'Religion, Science, and the Gothic'. Professor Josephine Guy, the Head of School, gave a fantastic welcome talk on the importance of public speaking both inside and outside of academia. Presentations were then followed by an informal wine reception, which provided participants with a chance to network, reflect on the day's events, and celebrate the end of term.

Conference Booklet Download the The English Showcase 2017 Programme
 
 

2016

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Proud of Your Work? #ShowOff16

The English Showcase 2016 took place on the 10th February 2016, showing off a great variety of projects and research. The event included an introductory talk by a special guest speaker, award-winning novelist (and School of English alumna) Clare Harvey, who revealed how she turned her University of Nottingham Masters submissions into a two-book publishing deal.

Eleven student speakers discussed the projects that they were most proud of, covering a range of topics including theatre, creative writing, literature and language. The presentations then closed with a discussion from Associate Professor of Viking Studies, Dr Christina Lee, on the various routes English research offers. 

Please see the Showcase resources, produced by the student committee, for more information on the 2016 English Showcase.

Conference Booklet Read Thomas Legendre's blog about Clare's keynote lecture

 
 

2015

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The English Showcase 2015 was the first of its kind for the School of English.

It was authoritative, consistently interesting, and full of enthusiasm. Speaking in public can be very difficult, and speaking about your work in front of peers and academic staff even more so, but the students handled that side of things with aplomb. Throughout, in fact, the Showcase felt like a professional academic conference – confirming the evident care with which it had been planned and structured. Well done!
 

- Dr Nathan Waddell, Assistant Professor of Literary Modernism, discussing the first English Showcase in 2015

 

Please see the video below to hear from some of the participants and organisers of the 2015 English Showcase.

Conference Booklet
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The 2015 logo
 
The English Showcase poster
 
 
 

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School of English

Trent Building
The University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
email: english-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk