News and Events
Guest Lecture
‘Rape, Race and Gender in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)’
Dr. Jessica Cox, Department of English, Brunel University.
5.30pm, Thursday, 18 February 2010
Lecture Room 14, Canterbury Building, UWL
Degree Day
Graduating students from the Department of English recently celebrated their achievements at the University's Degree Day. Click here for further details and photos.
Poetry Fellow Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year Award
English Department Poetry Fellow Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch's latest collection of poems, Not in These Shoes (Picador) has been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2009. The announcement was made at the Guardian Hay Festival on Monday. Not in These Shoes is shortlisted along with two collections of short stories -
Deborah Kay Davies's Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Gee Williams's Blood Etc. Responding to the news, Samantha said ' I am absolutely thrilled that my book has reached the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year, especially given that the longlist was so strong this year with four other poets (Robert Minhinnick, Sheenagh Pugh, Zoe Skoulding and Matthew Francis) whose work I admire very much. It is an honour to be listed alongside the outstanding short story writers, Deborah Kay Davies and Gee Williams'. The winner will be announced in Cardiff on June 15.
Postgraduate Students Awarded Scholarships
Congratulations to postgraduate students Maryanne Foort (MA TEFL candidate) and John Burton (PhD candidate), who have both been awarded W. D. Llewellyn Memorial Scholarships by the University of Wales, Lampeter. For more information on postgraduate programmes in the English department please click here.
April 2009
Poetry Fellow Longlisted for Wales Book of the Year Award
The English Department's Poetry Fellow, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, has been included within the longlist for the Wales Book of the Year Award. Samantha’s book, Not in These Shoes, published by Picador Poetry, was one of 10 books selected from more 200 entries for the English-language award.
Samantha’s fingers are firmly crossed to see whether Not in These Shoes makes the shortlist of three books that will be announced in late May, before the final winner is announced at a glittering awards ceremony in Cardiff in June.
A sequence from Not in These Shoes has been chosen for inclusion in the Forward Anthology 2009 and Samantha is the first Welsh poet to reach the Picador list.
January 2009
Dic Edwards' Play to be Produced in Copenhagen
Creative Writing Director Dic Edwards’ play Casanova Undone will be produced in Copenhagen’s leading English language theatre “That Theatre” from February 25th for a month-long run.
Plays and Players said of this play when it was produced at The Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow:
‘Dic Edwards might be embarrassed to have his work bracketed with Wedekind but he is a highly accomplished demolisher of myths with an ear for accomplished dialogue and a mind for the aphorism: "Just because we have to lower our standards doesn't mean we have to live by them" Stimulating and provocative.’
After the London production Time Out said:
‘Dic Edwards opens his sensational play with Casanova on his last legs. The writing is sanguine and sophisticated. Intellectually zestful’
October 2008
Romeo and Juliet Review
On Wednesday 22 October, the department organised a trip to see the Wales Theatre Company's production of Romeo and Juliet at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. One of our students, Michelle Zacharias, was asked to write a review for the Theatre in Wales website (www.theatre-wales.co.uk), which is reprinted below:
'Before attending the performance I read a September review from the Guardian about this production, which awarded one star out of five. This may seem a little harsh, although the lack of conviction in Jack Ryder’s performance as Romeo would have drawn criticism from the most sympathetic observer.
At the relatively large arts centre theatre there were few empty seats. As the audience spilled in there was an understated air of anticipation at the prospect of new production of the popular Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet by Michael Bogdanov. Although the play is often subjected to modernisation, making fashion and concept almost the norm, this adventurous new production received a reception at the final curtain that would be best described as polite.
It is worth mentioning the set. The stage itself was sparse, but with a projected backdrop of scenes of Verona (majestic buildings, rustic street dwellings) that gave an impression of greater space. The performance of Sara Lloyd Gregory as Juliet was memorable, full of energy, and showed the actress’s maturity in the way that she portrayed naivety and distress. This is particularly encouraging given the actress’s youth, and one hopes that as her voice matures her performances will gain power.
The Nurse, played by Caroline Pritchard delivered her lines in broad Welsh accent which sat pleasingly with the dialogue, giving it a genuine, colloquial feel. This put the audience more at ease with the affection with which her character is imbued. Russell Gomer aptly projected the looseness of Mercutio, playing him as a lairy, bar-brawling swathe of double-entendres. The performance was reminiscent of that of a pantomime actor, and brought comic relief in light vulgarity. The audience reacted most warmly to this.
Sadly, I will remember this comic or farcical aspect of the play more fondly than the performance of the leading man. Popularity precedes Jack Ryder, a well established TV actor but by no means established as a Shakespearean. His voice at times lacked conviction, and aggression was certainly his strong point, but not the tears and heartache which are surely unalterable facets of the love-torn Romeo. His words occasionally came across as those of a self-conscious student reading lines from a page. This made the play’s conclusion particularly ineffective, with Ryder’s flat performance marring the tragic ending, leaving the audience lacking sympathy for the lovers.
This spoiled the balance that Bogdanov was perhaps aiming for between comedy and the tragic love affair, as the serious aspects were weakly performed. This was perhaps most evident in the scene during which Romeo and Juliet become enamoured with each other, but it is barely noticeable among the cheer and festivities of the Capulets’ party. This is realistic perhaps, but this is a play about the Western world’s most famous lovers, not to be undermined by gratuity. Regrettably, this imbalance is representative of what was amiss with this performance.'
- Michelle Zacharias
August 2008
Adapting the Nineteenth Century Conference
The University of Wales Lampeter recently hosted an interdisciplinary conference with the theme, ‘Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisitng, Revising and Rewriting the Past’, organised by Dr. Jessica Cox from the Department of English and Dr. Alexia Bowler from Swansea University. The conference attracted more than sixty delegates from all over the world – including America, Australia, and Europe – and included keynote addresses by Professor Patricia Duncker (University of Manchester), Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Hull), and Professor Imelda Whelehan (De Montfort University). The organisers now hope to publish selected papers from the conference in a special edited collection.
Conference organisers and keynote speakers. From left to right:
Dr. Alexia Bowler, Professor Ann Heilmann, Professor Patricia Duncker,
Dr. Jessica Cox, Professor Imelda Whelehan
English Lecturer Wins Recognition Award
The Toni Morrison Society in America has given a Recognition Award to Dr Rebecca Ferguson of the Department of English for her book "Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison" (Peter Lang, 2007), which explores the complexities of African-American identities within Toni Morrison's novels and the historical and intertextual dimensions of her writing.
Rebecca said "The award came as a rather startling surprise but I am delighted to have been selected for this recognition, especially when one considers that Morrison is now a major, canonical American author and a great many new books on her writing have been published recently."
Rebecca teaches modules on ‘Black Women Writers of the USA’ and ‘The American Short Story’ and selected nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American novelists along with areas of seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature and literary theory as part of Lampeter's degrees in English and English: Modern Literatures. She also contributes core teaching to two of the Department’s MA courses (MA in English, MA in ‘The Word and the Visual Imagination’).
July 2008
Degree Day
Graduating students from the Department of English recently celebrated their achievements at the Univeristy’s Degree Day ceremony. Click here for further details and photos.
New: MA in English
The English department is pleased to announce the launch of a new MA in English. Click here for further details.
Announcing the Retirement of Mr Peter Miles
The English Department regrets to announce the retirement of Mr Peter Miles. Peter was appointed at Lampeter in 1973, and during a long and productive career as a lecturer he developed probably the widest range of teaching in the English Department; he was able to offer engaging and original lectures and seminar courses on material ranging from the Renaissance to the modern novel. His commitment to the culture of the working class in relation to literature has stood out, however, and his module ‘Writing and the Working Class’ is unique in British universities. Reflecting his specific interests in novels and their illustrations, Peter’s MA module ‘The Novel, Art and Artist’ also broke new ground in the study of literature and the visual arts, and was always very popular within the Masters programme, setting a number of former students onto the path of their own research interests.
Through his publications Peter has contributed substantially to scholarship on the English novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and to bibliography, textual criticism, book history, cultural history, and the politics of printing and publishing. Along with his long-term interests and important contributions to “mainstream” scholarship on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and literature of the working class, Peter has taken the critical editor’s methodical task of unraveling obscure allusions and explaining sources and analogues, and greatly extended it in critical essays, while retaining a firm belief that discovery could be serendipitous and surprising. His essay, ‘Smollett, Rowlandson and a Problem of Identity: Decoding Names, Bodies and Gender in Humphry Clinker’, Eighteenth-Century Life (1996), was described in the Scriblerian as ‘a splendid bit of historical sleuthing’ and ‘a model of what precise and responsible scholarship can achieve’. The essay was a nominee for the Clifford Prize (awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for the year’s best article in the field). Other essays by Peter on Smollett have encompassed such wide-ranging themes as bookhood, madness, topography, and travel.
Peter has combined a deep and serious scholarly interest in books (as a bibliographer and collector of books) with a somewhat wicked and sometimes irreverent (but never malevolent) sense of humour. Immensely erudite, Peter knows much more than he would probably give himself credit for; he is modest about himself and his accomplishments, but his election to Fellowship of the English Association was a measure of the regard in which his work is held. This includes his very significant work in editing a number of canonical texts, including The Woman in White and The Dream Woman and Other Stories by Wilkie Collins, Smollet’s Humphry Clinker, and (with David Skilton) Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope. Peter’s joint work with Malcolm Smith on culture in Interwar Britain, notably Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (1987), articulates his specific concerns with the representation through literature and cinema of class-based ideologies, and the struggle for hegemony. Also highly regarded are Peter’s editions of works related to his ‘Literature and the Working Class’ module, notably Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and also Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. Peter also wrote a study guide on Wuthering Heights, and for many years acted as Reviews Editor and as a contributor to The Powys Review. His extensive reviewing in journals such as Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, ANQ, The Book Collector, Eighteenth-Century Life, New Welsh Review, Notes and Queries, Style, and Trivium, extended the purview of his core scholarship into areas like critical and cultural theory.
Any portrait of Peter would be incomplete without adding that as a person and colleague, he has been unusually conscientious in both senses of the word – he would take the utmost trouble over anything he undertook to do (even if nobody would have been any the wiser if he hadn’t), and he really has tried to do the right thing by others, even when the process could be wearisome. Moreover one colleague has described Peter as perhaps the most able person known to them in the profession, and there is no doubt that Peter has served his colleagues extremely well in a variety of roles; his adept, astute handling of complex matters inspired confidence. His experience, patience and reliability as a guide to the intricacies and procedures of academic life have encouraged somewhat intimidated PhD candidates to feel unequivocally that they can belong to the “academic club”, and junior colleagues to realise their full membership thereof. As Head of Department and in all situations where he has taken a lead, Peter has been wise in decision-making and ever considerate towards those for whom he has been responsible. He will be sorely and justly missed. The Department of English hopes that he will continue to pursue some areas of his research and to collect books.
June 2008
Postgraduate Study in the Department of English: Bursaries Available
To celebrate the opening of our new Rowland Williams Research Centre, the university is offering 100 Bursaries for Home/EU students starting a full-time taught Masters Programme in October 2008. The Bursary comprises a 50% discount on normal tuition fees.
Eligible courses in the Department of English include:
MA in Creative & Script Writing
May 2008
Harrison Solow Wins the Pushcart Prize
Harrison Solow, lecturer in English and recently appointed Writer in Residence at the University, has won the Pushcart Prize for her recent essay 'Bendithion'.
Within the essay, Harrison explores Lampeter, Timothy Evans and Welshness, and writes about the University, its centrality to the town, and her uneasy beginnings there contrasted to the ease of life in Lampeter. The essay was recently published, along with an accompanying CD of Timothy Evans singing, in the prestigious American literary journal AGNI,
'Bendithion', which means “blessings” in Welsh, was selected as a winner from more than 8000 entries nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The Prize celebrates the best of the small presses, with the name coming from a protest against mainstream publishers in 1972 when authors took to the streets of Manhattan selling their books from pushcarts.
The Pushcart Prize is one of the highlights of the American literary scene or “A truly remarkable collection of the finest small press poems, essays and short stories” according to Booklist Magazine.
April 2008
Reading Wales
Over 2008 and 2009, the Department of English is organizing a series of lectures called ‘Reading Wales’, which will bring together leading scholars in the field of Welsh writing in English to address key issues in the study of the English-language literature of Wales.
In the presence of the University’s President and Vice-Chancellor, the ‘Reading Wales’ series was launched on April 16 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, OBE (Swansea University), Wales’s leading literary critic. Under the title ‘War of the Word: Preacher and Writer in Welsh Writing in English’, Professor Thomas’s lecture examined the relationship between Welsh writing in English and Welsh Nonconformity.
Future speakers in the series will include Professor Tony Brown (Bangor University), Dr Katie Gramich (Cardiff University), and Dr Sarah Prescott (Aberystwyth University). Details will be made available here in due course.
It is our intention to bring together all the lectures in this series in a future edition of the University’s long-running scholarly journal, Trivium, to be edited by the Department’s Anthony Dyson Fellow in Poetry, Dr Matthew Jarvis.
‘Reading Wales’ is a series of public lectures, to which all are invited.
For questions or further details, please contact Dr Matthew Jarvis: m.jarvis@lamp.ac.uk
Dr Dic Edwards’ work featured in Stop The War series
On Thursday 24th April at St James's Church in Piccadilly, London there will be the third of Stop The War's "much praised" series of events. The concert entitled Illuminations will feature the composer Michael Nyman, violinist Nigel Kennedy, literary figures like A L Kennedy and include a performance of a scene from the opera Manifest Destiny, whose libretto was written by Lecturer in Creative Writing Dr Dic Edwards. Dic’s play Utah Blue is also being performed at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff this month, while his play Casanova Undone will be running for a season at the highly regarded That Theatre in Copenhagen.
For more information about Creative Writing at Lampeter please contact d.edwards@lamp.ac.uk.
February 2008
Joint Honours (English and History) student Johanna Jones from UWL’s franchise partner, Coleg Powys, Brecon, has been published in the magazine Country Quest. Jo’s article, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis, alias Gerald of Wales’ appears in the January 2008 edition of this well-established magazine. The departments of English and History would like to congratulate her on this achievement, and look forward to more publications in the future!
For further information on studying at UWL via Coleg Powys please contact Dr. Philippa Davies, Coleg Powys, Brecon, p.davies@coleg-powys.ac.uk
Harrison Solow's short story "The Postmaster's Song", set in Lampeter (and the University), has just been announced as one of the 10 winning stories in an international competition for short fiction held by Cinnamon Press in November 2007. It will be published by the Press in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, an anthology of short stories, in September of 2008.
Lecturer in Creative Writing Dr Dic Edwards’ latest publication, Walt Whitman and Other Poems (Oberon Books, 2007), has been nominated by the Academi for the Wales Book of the Year Award. These prizes are awarded annually to the two best Welsh language and English language works in the fields of creative writing and literary criticism. Further information may be found at the Academi website: www.academi.org.
November 2007
The English department is currently celebrating the publication of a number of works by members of staff. Dr. Peter Mitchell’s book, ‘The Purple Island’ and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy and Theology (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / Associated University Presses, 2007), published earlier this month, was followed by a special edition of Trivium. The Nature and Culture of the Human Body: Lampeter Multidisciplinary Essays (Trivium, 37), edited by Dr. Mitchell, is the latest in a well-established series of significant interdisciplinary publications from this journal and was launched at the recent Founder’s Day celebrations. Dr. Rebecca Ferguson, recently recognized for her long service to the university, has further cause to celebrate following the publication of her book, Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Peter Lang, 2007). In addition, Harrison Solow’s essay ‘Bendithion’ has just been published in the US-based literary journal Agni. In a new departure for that journal, Harrison's work is accompanied by a CD by the Welsh tenor Timothy Evans, the subject of her essay. Dr. Helen Vella Bonavita’s book, Caelius Secundus Curio his historie of the war of Malta (published by ACMRS), along with Dr Dic Edwards’s Walt Whitman and Other Poems and Two Immortality Plays (both published by Oberon Books) are due for publication in the near future, further cementing the department’s reputation for excellence in research.
Contact Information
Department of English
University of Wales Lampeter
Lampeter, Ceredigion
Wales, UK, SA48 7ED
Telephone:
+44 (0) 1570 424764
Facsimile:
+44 (0) 1570 424992
E-mail: admin-english@lamp.ac.uk
