What's New?
PhD Funding
The Department is pleased to announce a number of studentships for PhD study in 2013. For Literary Studies applicants there is an AHRC studentship available, and Creative Writers as well as Literary Studies applicants can apply for the DCDS (Doctoral Career Development Studentship). Both types of studentship cover tuition fees and include a maintenance allowance. In order to be considered for these awards, a full PhD application must be received by the Postgraduate Admissions Office by 31 January 2013. For further information about these studentships, see Fees and Funding. Queries about PhD study in the Department should be addressed to the Director of Postgraduate Studies, Dr Jayne Archer. (Posted 21 December 2012)
UPDATE: New documents shed controversial light on nation’s best-loved poem: Keats’s ode “To Autumn”
In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday 23 March, Richard Marggraf Turley spoke to John Humphreys about archival discoveries by researchers here at Aberystwyth University. Their research suggests that lying beneath the autumnal mellowness of one of the nation’s best-loved poems, John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”, is a murkier world of banking crisis, rising prices and striking workers.
The previously unseen documents also suggest that the traditional site of the famous “stubble-plains” in “To Autumn” should be revised. Long believed to describe the picturesque water-meadows lining the River Itchen, Keats’s cornfields are more likely, the researchers argue, to portray the west-facing slopes of St Giles’s Hill, overlooking Winchester from its eastern extremity.
Generations of fans swooning along the "Keats Walk" may have been lead - literally - up the garden path by previous scholarly studies. When Keats arrived in Winchester in summer 1819, he did so in the midst of rising tensions over corn prices and agricultural working conditions. Bankers-turned-landowners were snapping up grain-producing land in Winchester to exploit high bread prices and a glut of labour (due to men returning from the Napoleonic Wars). The slopes of St Giles’s Hill had recently been turned over to corn – and it is these that Keats would have seen when he climbed the popular tourist spot. England’s most famous field now lies under a multi-storey car park.
“Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester” is published in the current edition of The Review of English Studies (vol 63, November 2012). The authors are Dr Jayne Archer and Professor Richard Marggraf Turley of the Department of English and Creative Writing, and Professor Howard Thomas from the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences. See press coverage: Guardian; Daily Telegraph 23 March ; Daily Mail; Oxford University blog. (Original post 23 March 2012)
- In a recent update on this research, the Times Literary Supplement (5 December 2012) has printed a Commentary focused on political, environmental and literary influences in Keats’s ode “To Autumn”.
Wales Book of the Year Judge
Professor Richard Marggraf Turley has been announced as one of the English panel judges for the 2013 Wales Book of the Year competition (Literature Wales): http://walesbookoftheyear.co.uk/2013-award-2/
Richard is a previous recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry (2007), and won the “People’s Choice” award (Media Wales) in the 2010 Wales Book of the Year. Visit his Romanticism Blog. His fellow judges are Ffion Hague and Jasper Fforde.
MA Open Evening
On Tuesday 4 December there was an Open Evening for anyone interested in MA study in the Department of English and Creative Writing. The Evening included short presentations on the MA schemes – Creative Writing and Literary Studies, including the pathways in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Eighteenth Century Literature and Romanticism, Welsh Writing in English, Postmodern Writing, and American Literature – the application process, accommodation and funding. Prospective students were able to discuss and ask questions about MA study with members of staff and current MA students. If you missed this event but would like information, please contact Julie Roberts or Tiffany Atkinson. (Updated 21 December)
PhD Open Evening
On Thursday 6 December there was an Open Evening for anyone interested in PhD study in the Department of English and Creative Writing. The Evening included short presentations on doctoral study, the application process, accommodation and funding. Prospective students were able to discuss and ask questions about doctoral study with members of staff and current PhD students. If you missed the event but are interested in doctoral study in the Department of English and Creative Writing, please email the Director of Postgraduate Studies, Dr Jayne Archer. (Updated 21 December)
CONTEMPO - Research Cafe
The Aber Research Café (Wednesday, 12 December) brought to the fore the work of departmental research centre, CONTEMPO. Themes of environmentalism and responses to devolution characterise recent critical, creative and specifically poetic engagements. The presentation described recent sessions on: international cross-city writing/performance projects; ‘Stone Poems’ (about poems in the environment); and the recent session by Fred Wah, Canada’s current Parliamentary Laureate (a post similar to that of National Poet of Wales). The Cafés are an opportunity for all disciplines within the university to bring together their thoughts and insights. (Updated 21 December 2012)
Research Centre News
Two well-known scholars of eighteenth-century women’s writing and culture are to join the Advisory Board of the department’s Centre for Women’s Writing and Literary Culture: Professor Paula R. Backscheider, Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar, Auburn University & Professor Catherine Ingrassia, Virginia Commonwealth University. “We are delighted to welcome them to the Centre and look forward to working together in the future”, said Sarah Prescott, CWWLC Director.
Congratulation to Postgraduate Reps
Many congratulations to all our new Postgraduate Research Centre Representatives for 2012-13:
Centre for Women’s Writing and Literary Culture: Kat Dawes and Steph Jones
Centre for Romantic Studies: Stephanie Churms
David Jones Centre: Ollie Bevington and Jamie Harris
Contempo: Ruqqiya Greenidge and John Wilson
Queries or ideas for Centre activities can now be directed to the appropriate Centre representative.
PhD Student's Publishing Success
Many congratulations to PhD student, David Towsey, pictured left, who has signed a publishing contract with Jo Fletcher Books at Quercus for his trilogy, The Walkin’. The first book in the series, Your Brother’s Blood, will be published in 2013.
It has been nine hundred years since man last used machines. Technology, science and medicine have been forgotten, leaving in their wake a twisted legacy: the Walkin’. The disease is passed down from generation to generation; it causes men, women and children to live on after death.
Dave was nominated for a British Fantasy Society award for Best Short Fiction in 2008. He regularly reviews for critical journals, including the New Welsh Review and the BSFA’s critical journal, Vector. Of this success, Dave said, ‘I can’t wait to start working with Jo Fletcher and her team. The titles coming out under the Jo Fletcher imprint are unbelievably exciting; to have my work become part of such a vibrant and diverse list is a real honour.’ See more information at the British Fantasy Society. (Posted 25 Oct 2012)
Poetry's Public
From 6.00 to 7.30pm on Tuesday 30th October,the Department of English and Creative Writing will be one of five universities taking part in a live transatlantic video-link-up from Ryerson University, Toronto, entitled ‘Poetry’s Public’, and featuring three poets, including Canada’s current Poet Laureate. See Poetry's Public Poster
The poets will explore the rhetoric, politics, and ethics of poetry and its public, in conversation and readings from their work.
The Aberystwyth venue for the event is the Hugh Owen Library Video Suite (on the ground floor), and the poets taking part are:
FRED WAH. Currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Fred Wah was named Canada's fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureatein December 2011, a position he will hold for two years. Since 1965, Wah has published twenty-four books of poetry, the first entitled Lardeau (1965), the most recent, is a door (2009). Waiting For Saskatchewan (1985) won him a Governor General's Literary Award in 1986 and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry in 1992.
DALE SMITH. Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University (Toronto), Dale Smith is an American poet, editor, and specialist in rhetoric and public culture. His poetry and essays have been widely published, and he is author of Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship and Dissent after 1960 (University of Alabama Press, 2012).
HOA NGUYEN. With an MFA in Poetics from New College of California in San Francisco, Hoa Nguyen is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks. She has worked extensively in poetry communities for youth and adults across North America, most recently curating a reading series, and teaching poetics at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her latest poetry collection is As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012). (Posted 25 Oct 2012)
All Welcome
Launch of the David Jones Centre
This new research centre will be launched at a conference on Friday 14 September 2012, at the Drwm, National Library of Wales. David Jones (1895-1974) was an artist and poet whose work, though until recently excluded from the academic canon of Modernism, is now seen as a highly original – and perhaps as a distinctively Welsh – instance of Modernist creativity. The new Research Centre, inspired by (but not restricted to) Jones’s work, will explore the interaction of word and image in all the arts, as well as focusing on the critical question of defining and interpreting Welsh Modernism today. The conference will include a keynote speaker, presentations on the National Library’s David Jones collections and a new film, David Jones Between the Wars: the Years of Achievement, introduced by its writer/co-director Derek Shiel. See details. (Posted 6 July 2012)
More Good News for Kat
More good news for our creative writing PhD Student Kat Dawes, pictured below, who was the winner of this year’s LBA Associates prize. She has now been awarded the £1500 Mair Waldo scholarship. The award, tenable for one year, is for a postgraduate student working on ‘research that increases the body of knowledge relating specifically to Wales’. Kat is writing a novel set in Llangrannog among the surfing community of west Wales. (Posted 26 June 2012)
Learned Society of Wales 'Frontiers' Lecture, 28 June 2012
Damian Walford Davies will be presenting the next lecture in the Frontiers series, entitled Mapping the Miracle: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Psychocartography of Welsh Space. This event also marks the publication of Damian's latest book, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English published by the University of Wales Press. The lecture will take place in Room 2.03 of the Humanites Building, Cardiff University at 6.30 pm. See further details of Mapping the Miracle. (Posted 14 June)
PhD Research Trip to the US
PhD student, Nigel Rodenhurst, has recently returned from a fascinating research trip to the United States. Nigel won a Library of Congress scholarship from the AHRC which provided him with funding to travel to Washington DC. Here, he was able to use the world-renowned library at the John W. Kluge Center to research the extensive archive of Philip Roth’s papers, manuscripts and correspondence, which are located in the manuscripts room in the Thomas Jefferson building. He was also able to meet other scholars and visited the National Holocaust Memorial. (Posted 14 June)
Jayne Archer is Students' Choice
The Student-Led Teaching Awards were held on Thursday 24 May in the Guild of Students and were attended by a mixture of students and staff members. The evening was led by Guild Education Officer Jess Leigh and Professor John Grattan PVC. Dr Jayne Archer of the Department of English and Creative Writing was awarded Personal Tutor of the Year. The students said: ‘Jayne is an incredibly supportive and understanding member of the English department. She chooses to interact directly with students and encourage and challenge any ideas that are brought forward to her. Her dedication to meeting with students outside of the times that she is obliged to, illustrates her passion and genuine approach to being a University tutor.’ More on the Student-Led Teaching Awards. (Posted 1 June 2012)
Devolved Voices Project - PhD Studentship Opportunity
Following the award of a £232,042 research-project grant by the Leverhulme Trust, the Department of English & Creative Writing invites applications for a three-year full-time PhD studentship (covering home/EU fees and maintenance), funded by the Trust, as part of the project ‘Devolved Voices: Welsh Poetry in English since 1997’. The studentship will start in September 2012.
The topic of the PhD will be the role of women poets since Wales’s devolution ‘yes’ vote in 1997, especially those whose reputations have been established since that time. The PhD will be supervised in the Department by Professor Peter Barry, who is Principal Investigator for the ‘Devolved Voices’ project.
The successful candidate will have a good first degree in literature, or literature and creative writing, and preferably an MA which included substantial work on poetry, or equivalent professional experience in a relevant field.
See further particulars - Devolved Voices Details . Informal enquiries welcome: email Professor Peter Barry or phone him on 01970 622538. (Posted 1 June 2012)
Congratulations to the Winner and Runners up in the LBA Prize
Each year, students in the department have the opportunity to submit a piece of fiction for the Aberystwyth/LBA Prize for Fiction; the winner gains a £500 cash prize and the chance to meet Luigi Bonomi, founder-director of leading London literary agency LBA, to discuss the potential of his or her work.
The winner of the 2012 competition is Kat Dawes (pictured), one of the department’s creative writing PhD students. Luigi Bonomi wrote of her work: “there’s a wonderful voice in this piece, very expressive and with a powerfully haunting tone. The piece is suggestive of real potential for the future.”
Two other entrants were selected by Luigi Bonomi as runners-up: these were Jack Barton and Monique Jensen, both undergraduates. The department extends its congratulations to all three. (Posted 31 May 2012)
Poetry Nomination
Congratulations to Kath Stansfield, (Aber PhD graduate in Creative Writing and currently Lecturer in the department) , who has been long-listed for this year’s Eric Gregory Award for her poetry collection, Playing House. The Eric Gregory Awards, for a collection by poets under the age of 30, were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets. Eric Craven Gregory, also known as Peter Gregory (1888 –1959) was Chairman of publishers Lund Humphries and benefactor of modern art and artists in Britain - http://www.societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory. (Posted 15 May 2012)
Lecturer Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2012
We are greatly pleased to announce that Tiffany Atkinson has been shortlisted in the Wales Book of the Year Award 2012 for her poetry collection, Catulla et al. Described by the publisher, Bloodaxe: “Catulla et al summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus – his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy – by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment.” Read more about Catulla et al, including reviews.
Awarded by Literature Wales (formerly Academi) - the National Company for the development of literature in Wales - "Wales Book of the Year should be about passion, ambition and talent, and the short-listed authors have it in bucket-loads." (Spencer Jordan). The Wales Book of the Year Award Winners will be announced in the Awards Ceremony at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff on Thursday 12 July 2012. (Posted 11 May 2012)
Devolved Voices - a Major Research Project
The development of Welsh poetry in English since 1997 will be the focus for a major new research project which will pay particular attention to the work of poets who have achieved prominence and recognition since Wales’s devolution vote.
Professor Peter Barry (pictured) has been awarded a £232,042 Leverhulme Research Project Grant to lead the ‘Devolved Voices’ project which begins in September of this year and will run for the three years.
Peter said, “We are delighted to have this exciting opportunity to consider the energy, achievements and challenges of contemporary Welsh poetry in English. We are extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support.”
The project includes plans to produce a wide range of publications. One full-length scholarly volume will place contemporary Welsh poetry in English in its wider British poetic context, whilst another will provide detailed studies of major figures within the field. A book of extended interviews with key poets will provide in-depth engagement with practitioners themselves, and a final book of essays will consider the specific question of poetic production within the context of Wales’s devolutionary journey. It will also launch a video-rich website which will provide an important record of discussions with poets themselves, of poets reading their own work, and of interviews with other notable players on the contemporary English-language poetry scene in Wales. The website is intended to serve not only as a significant archive of material for future scholars but also as an entry-point into the project’s work for readers of poetry in general.
Peter will be joined on the ‘Devolved Voices’ team by the critic and scholar of contemporary English-language poetry in Wales, Dr Matthew Jarvis, and by the poet and former editor of New Welsh Review, Kathryn Gray. A PhD student will be recruited to work on a key aspect of the project.
‘Devolved Voices’ boasts an illustrious Advisory Board which brings together National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, T. S. Eliot prize-winner Professor Philip Gross, poet, novelist and commentator Owen Sheers, noted experts on Welsh writing in English Professor Jane Aaron and Professor Tony Brown, and the current editor of Poetry Wales, Dr Zoë Skoulding.
Damian Walford Davies, Head of Department, welcomed Professor Barry’s success and commented, “This major research grant, which the Department is delighted to have secured, reflects our intellectual commitment to Welsh Writing in English in its local, national and international contexts. The ‘Devolved Voices’ project will deliver a range of seminal publications and platforms that will in turn energise the literary culture it explores.” (Posted 11 April 2012)
Dylan Thomas - Radio 4's Great Lives
Damian Walford Davies, Head of Department, could be heard in last week’s Great Lives on Radio 4. Dylan Thomas was proposed by Welsh poet Owen Sheers in this specially recorded edition at Bristol's More Than Words Listening Festival. Includes Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood. Matthew Parris presents. Listen to the podcast - Dylan Thomas
Terry Hetheringon Young Writers Award 2012
Terry Hetherington, who died in 2007, was a poet, short story writer and Welsh Academi Member. In association with the Dylan Thomas Centre, the Terry Hetherington Writer’s Bursary was established to award a young writer aged 16-23. We are delighted that Grace Gay, an undergraduate student of Creative Writing with us here at Aber, will see two of her pieces, a poem Remember All I gave, and a prose piece, Waves, published in the award anthology. The anthology will be entitled Cheval and will be published in paperback by Parthian Press. Congratulations Grace! (Posted 3 April 2012)
Successful 2012 Sixth Form Conference
On Monday 19 March 2012 the Department of English & Creative Writing hosted its annual Sixth Form Conference, attended by 80 students from five local schools. The conference aimed to give these young people a sense of the Department’s special environment, its combination of academic and creative culture; and in this, according to a reliable source, it was a great success. After a brief introduction by Professor Damian Walford Davies, the opening speaker was Dr Jayne Archer, whose presentation on King Lear brilliantly conveyed some of the intellectual excitement and challenges of studying English at university. We were then delighted to be able to introduce Owen Sheers (pictured) who gave a fascinating talk on his novel Resistance and on his role in its film adaptation (of which he showed some clips). A whole variety of issues were raised by his talk and the discussion afterwards – to do with the processes and constraints of creative work, both what inspires writing and how it can be achieved – that made the occasion unforgettable. We are immensely grateful to Owen Sheers for his contribution, and we very much wish to maintain links with him in the future. After a brief lunchtime tour of the university campus with student volunteers, our visitors returned for the afternoon session. This, the grand finale of the conference, was a talk by Professor Damian Walford Davies on Blake and the Romantic Imagination, a passionate meditation on the cultural and political significance of that great artist and poet. This was an apt conclusion to a day that had highlighted the creative possibilities and imaginative energy of the Department. Well done to those involved in organizing and delivering such a successful event. (Posted 23 March 2012)
New Welsh Review Internship
We are very pleased to host the New Welsh Review in the department and particularly pleased to be able to tell our own MA students about an excellent opportunity offered by this foremost literary magazine.
The New Welsh Review is seeking an enthusiastic intern to assist with the running of the magazine. The post will be for one day per week for up to 10 weeks starting from April 2012. The successful applicant will take on a variety of tasks each week, offering support to editorial, marketing and administrative staff. NWR is seeking an individual with a genuine interest in publishing who would like to gain valuable experience in the field. To be eligible for this post, you must currently be enrolled on a Creative Writing MA course in the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Closing date: 26 March 2012. To apply, please send your CV with a covering letter to admin@newwelshreview.com (Posted 16 March 2012)
Conference News: Wales Book of the Year Author to speak at Postgrad Conference in April
We will be delighted to welcome Wales Book of the Year Author, Ned Thomas, to our annual Postgraduate Conference, 25-27 April 2012. Ned will be one of the plenary speakers at the conference and will be giving a talk entitled "Traveller from an antique land" which will look at the Welsh people (and other minorities) both as perceived by others and as perceivers of other places. In 2011, Ned’s Welsh language memoir Bydoedd, which records his varied career as a writer, journalist, academic and publisher was named Wales’s Book of the Year. Full details. (Posted 16 March 2012)
Historian and Novelist as Detective: CWWLC Annual Lecture
Thursday 22 March 2012, 6pm, Y Drwm, National Library of Wales.
The Centre for Women's Writing and Literary Culture is delighted to welcome Professor Rebecca Stott, distinguished author and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, to give this year's Annual Lecture. Professor Stott is is the author of several books on Victorian literature and culture, two books of non-fiction, including a biography of Charles Darwin, and several acclaimed historical novels. Her latest book, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists will be pubished by Bloomsbury in May. In an open lecture entitled “Historian and Novelist as Detective: the Search for Darwin's Lost Predecessors", Professor Stott will bring together these many strands of scholarship in compelling creative-critical and interdisciplinary enquiry. All welcome. (Posted 14 March 2012)
Locating Revolution: Place, Voice Community, 9 -12 July 2012
A conference jointly hosted by the Wales and the French Revolution Project at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies; the Centre for Romantic Studies, Aberystwyth University; and the Department of English, Swansea University. This multi-disciplinary conference invites papers which engage with local, regional, national, European and transatlantic responses to the Age of Revolutions. Deadlinel for papers, 16 March 2012. Full details. (Posted 14 March 2012)
Congratulations to Lecturer in Creative Writing
Good news about Katherine Stansfield, a graduate of our BA, MA and PhD programmes, and currently holder of a temporary lectureship in the department: the novel she wrote for her PhD is to be published next year by Parthian. Set in a Cornish village at the time of the collapse of the pilchard-fishing industry, the novel is both gripping and literate, and Kath is to be congratulated on her achievement. (Posted 28 February 2012)