March 2016
ENGLISH@HOPE
The Hopkins Lecture 2016: Professor David Crystal
The English Department is very proud to host the world-renowned
language expert Professor David Crystal OBE who will deliver this
year’s Hopkins Lecture entitled “Where have all the dialect words
gone? Hopkins and a disappearing dictionary.” This talk discusses
dialect words from Professor Crystal’s recent book, The Disappearing Dictionary, and asks whether any are still being used in
Liverpool and Lancashire today.
Professor Crystal is the author of more than 100 books, patron and
fellow of numerous learned societies and associations, Honorary
Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, and a
very well-known broadcaster on both radio and television, having
presented programmes for the BBC and the Discovery Channel.
His works include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
the English Language, as well as - more recently - Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language
through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2014), You Say Potato: a Book
about Accents (2014, with son Ben Crystal), The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary (2015,
also with Ben), The Disappearing Dictionary: a Treasury of Lost Dialect Words (2015), and Making
a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015).
Professor Crystal has personal ties to Liverpool, having attended St Mary’s College in Crosby when
he was a teenager.
His lecture takes place in the EDEN Lecture Theatre at 5.30pm on Friday, 4th March.
The annual Hopkins Lecture, organized by the Department of English,
focuses on contemporary writing and language, and is named in honour of the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
who lived and worked in Liverpool between the end of 1879 and the
summer of 1881. Hopkins had particularly strong associations with St
Francis Xavier church, which now forms part of Liverpool Hope’s Creative Campus in the city centre; a Hopkins Hall and Hopkins garden at
the Creative Campus commemorate this. While in Liverpool, Hopkins
wrote some of his greatest poems, including “Felix Randal”.
Our Partners in India
Spotlight on
Research
In January, the English departments of Liverpool Hope University and Christ University, Bangalore, co-sponsored “Protean Frames: An International Conference on
Contemporary Discourses of Gender.” The conference was held at Christ University, organized by Dr Sushma V. Murthy, with Professor Cindy Hamilton, Dr Linda
McLoughlin, and Dr Manel Herat featured as speakers. A follow-up conference at
Liverpool Hope is planned for 2018. “Protean Frames” originated from discussions
during a trip to Christ University by Cindy Hamilton and Linda McLoughlin in 2014,
Dr Louise Wilson
with follow-up talks at Liverpool Hope in 2015 during a visit by Dr Abhaya, Head of
English, and Professor Kennedy, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Christ Uni-
versity. The recent conference moved our partnership another step forward. One
of the initiatives discussed was for each department to contribute to their partner’s
newsletter, and so a future issue of ‘English @ Hope’ will feature a contribution from
the English Department at Christ University.
Participants in
the “Protean
Frames” conference, Bangalore
As well as participating in the conference at Christ University, Cindy Hamilton
took part in a conference on “Christian Contributions to Media and Literature” at
Madras Christian College, Chennai. Cindy presented a paper on the role of the
American Tract Society in Christian publishing in mid-nineteenth-century India,
and also gave a lecture on detective fiction and had discussions with colleagues
in the English departments at the College. Further collaborative activities are
being planned, and we hope to welcome study-abroad students from Madras
Christian College in the coming years.
Discussions at
Madras Christian
College, Chennai
In May 2016, we look forward to welcoming Tulsi Badrinath, an award-winning
Indian writer from another partner institution, Stella Maris College, Chennai.
Dr Louise Wilson joined the English
Department as Lecturer in Medieval to
Early Modern Literature in September
2015. She has two main areas of specialism: the material and cultural history
of reading popular fiction in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, especially
chivalric and Greek romance and the
novella; and the translation and circulation in print of Spanish, French, and
Italian fiction in medieval and early
modern Europe.
She is currently completing a book on
reading for pleasure in early modern
England which investigates concerns
about the effects popular fiction would
have on readers’ bodies, minds, and
souls during the first age of literary
bestsellers from 1580-1620; she is
also editing the first modern critical
edition of Anthony Munday's translation of the bestselling chivalric romance, Palmerin of England, for the
MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations
series.
Her previous publications include Renaissance Paratexts (with Helen
Smith)(Cambridge, 2011; paperback,
2014), English Renaissance Translation Theory (with Neil Rhodes)
(MHRA, 2013), and numerous articles
and chapters on the Elizabethan translator, Anthony Munday, and the early
modern European book.
Before moving to Hope, Louise spent
five years at the University of St Andrews in Scotland where she was
firstly MHRA Research Fellow in English Renaissance Translation, then
was awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to continue her time there. Before that, she
spent three years as a research fellow
and lecturer at the University of Geneva where she collaborated with Professor Lukas Erne on the book,
Shakespeare and the Book Trade
(Cambridge, 2013), and taught courses on Shakespeare, early modern
literature, and book history. She has
also been Visiting Lecturer in Early
Modern European Cultural History at
the University of York St John. She
has a BA (Hons) in English Language
and Literature from Oxford University
and an MA (with Distinction) and PhD
from the University of York.
Louise is Associate Editor of the
MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations
series and is part of a six-member
research team that has just been
awarded three years of funding from
the Spanish government to investigate
the translation into English of early
modern Spanish romances. She has
given talks by invitation on book history and translation at conferences in
Toronto, New York, and Berlin, Aberdeen, Oxford, and Newcastle, and
was the keynote speaker at a conference on Anthony Munday in Seville in
2014.
This year, Louise has been elected a
fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, the home of
the largest collection of Shakespeare
and early modern materials in the
world; she will be going there for a
month from the middle of March to
carry out research and give talks.
Student Trips and Activities
English Writing Retreat to Plas Caerdeon
Final-year students visited Plas Caerdeon, Wales, in the first week
of February for a writing retreat. They spent three days there working on research projects and dissertations, and also found time to
build three rafts and race them round a pond, learn archery, take a
zipline through a forest, and play several high-stakes games of hide
and seek. Thanks to Graeme, Lei, Richard and all the other staff at
Plas Caerdeon for hosting us!
Shakespeare and Pizza
On the 21st of January, our first-year Single Honours students
and staff spent the evening reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
aloud together while enjoying pizza and wine. Students chose
their own roles from the play and notable performances included
Helen Kilheeney’s Orsino, Bethany Calvey’s Viola, and Zoe Kinsley’s very musical Feste.
Research
Dr Cuthbertson in Galway
In February Dr Guy Cuthbertson spent a week at
the National University of Ireland Galway as a
Moore Institute Visiting Research Fellow. This
was the first of three visits that Guy will make. In
his next visit during April he will give a public lecture, looking at Edward Thomas, the First World
War, and Ireland. Guy has been using the resources at the James Hardiman Library at NUI
Galway to research Irish writers Thomas greatly
admired, such as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory,
and J. M. Synge - for instance, Thomas commented that Synge’s Riders to the Sea is
‘wonderful & equal to the Greeks’.
Staff publications and talks
Dr Ruth Kircher has published a book chapter on
the so-called ‘matched-guise technique’, an experimental method for the elicitation of language
attitudes that Ruth has used as part of her own
research and which combines sociolinguistics and
the social psychology of language.
Kircher, R. (2016) “The matched-guise technique.” In: Zhu Hua (ed.). Research Methods in
Intercultural Communication. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 196-211.
Guy's final visit will be in May. He has published
widely on Thomas and his time at Galway will
help with current research projects. He and Professor Lucy Newlyn of Oxford University are the
General Editors of Edward Thomas's prose for
Oxford University Press.
English Language Research
Seminar Series
The English Department has once again played
host to a number of excellent invited speakers
over the last few months. We welcomed Dr Nicola Puckey from the University of Winchester
who spoke on “Challenges to the linguistic construction of womanhood: does a woman need a
vagina?”; Dr Mercedes Durham from the University of Cardiff who gave a paper entitled
“Attitudes, salience and language change: what
twitter can teach us (about the Welsh accent)”;
and Dr Mel Evans of the University of Birmingham who presented research on “Royal family
networks: exploring language variation and
change in Tudor Court English correspondence.”
On the 8th February, Dr Louise Wilson gave a
collaborative research presentation at the Creative Campus with Dr Stephe Harrop of the Drama Department. The talk was titled “Blood, Bodies, and Books: Staging Shakespeare’s Reading
in Titus Andronicus.” In the talk, Stephe and
Louise discussed the ways in which Louise’s
research on the history of the book had influenced Stephe’s adaptation and direction of the
play.