From the Old Brewery

PhD student Shailini Vinod talks with linguistics PhD research student Ekiyokere Ekiye about her studies in literature and linguistics and her various roles as a lecturer and communications instructor in Nigeria and Scotland.       

PhD students Ian Grosz and Shailini Vinod talk with Scots Scriever and newly appointed lecturer at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture Dr Shane Strachan about his journey from PhD to his appointment as lecturer, about his use of Doric and Scots as a creative platform, and about his role as current Scots Scriever. Shane also reads his poem Doric Dwams, discussing the inspiration for it and his collaboration with composer Emily de Simone and cellist Aileen Sweeney. 

PhD students Ian Grosz and Shailini Vinod talk with the directors of the George Washington Wilson Centre for Art and Visual Culture, Drs Silvia Cassini and Hans Hones, about how they are bringing the arts and sciences together through the activities of the centre.

The George Washington Wilson Centre brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines. Its members share a common concern in investigating art and visual culture: what it is; how it functions across different times, places and contexts; how we encounter or understand it. The Centre facilitates a range of activities fostering collaborative research into art and visual culture, including a regular seminar series; an interdisciplinary reading group; international conferences; and public engagement events.

The Centre takes its name from George Washington Wilson, the renowned Aberdeen-based Victorian photographer. The entire collection of George Washington Wilson’s photographic plates is held by the University Library.

See https://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/gww-centre-2169.php

Third Year PhD researcher Eden Unger Bowditch reads from her novel in progress Two-Hundred-and-Fifty Years at Home, and discusses the nature of ambiguity in the literary text.

Brian Keeley is a final year PhD student within the Dept. of Film & Visual Culture of the University of Aberdeen.  His research focusses on portrayals of heart transplantation in contemporary art and visual culture.  Brian’s thesis is practice-based and draws upon his own experience as a visual artist and filmmaker, and as a heart transplant recipient.  Despite being a standard procedure to treat end-stage heart failure for more than half a century, heart transplantation has a cultural legacy which pre-dates modern medical science, and is therefore based on superstition and fascination.   This is still reflected in films, for example, which typically depict narratives around heart transplantation in fantastical ways - through science-fiction, horror, or bio-sentimentality.  Storylines focus on supernatural or implausible donor-recipient relationships, and research suggests that such portrayals are harmful to public attitudes to organ donation and transplantation.  Contemporary visual art - and related academic research – is often concerned with conceptual notions of identity and altered corporeality.  High-profile art exhibitions themed around heart transplantation are almost exclusively presented from non-experiential perspectives, excluding voices of those with the lived experience.  The result is a denial of the reality of what is a chronic, and life-changing medical condition, in favour of speculative or metaphorical concepts.  Brian Keeley’s research argues that persistent cultural misrepresentations and stereotypes of heart transplantation would be deemed inappropriate were they applied to people with other forms of corporeal difference, disabilities, or marginalised vulnerabilities.  Link:  Brian Keeley – The making of his 2016 artwork RENAISSANCE:  https://briankeeley.wordpress.com/renaissance/   

Summary

This podcast explores the work that is being undertaken to produce a ten volume edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry at Aberdeen. Alison Lumsden, the Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded project The Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry: Engaging New Audiences, explains what is involved in creating such an edition and with research fellows Natalie Tal Harries and Anna Fancett discuss why it is needed and their personal interests in Scott. As ECRs Natalie and Anna share their own journeys from PhD to their current posts, and explain what their day to day work with the Walter Scott Research Centre involves. 

Bio Sir Walter Scott Research Centre 

The Walter Scott Research Centre was established in 1991. It exists to conduct and to promote research into Scott and his works, the intellectual world in which he grew up and on which he drew, the contexts in which he worked, and the ways in which his work was used by other writers, other arts, business and politics, particularly in the nineteenth century. Its interests are interdisciplinary and its scope is international. The Centre is primarily engaged in project research, but also supports the research activity of its individual members and facilitates the study of Scott at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The Centre is now engaged in editing a 10-volume edition of Scott’s Poetry under the leadership of Professor Alison Lumsden. Two volumes in the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry have been published: Marmion, edited by Ainsley McIntosh (2018) and The Shorter Poems, edited by Gillian Hughes and P. D. Garside. Poetry from the Waverley Novels and Other Writings, edited by David Hewitt, and The Lady of the Lake, edited by Alison Lumsden are now well underway. 

Ali Lumsden 

Ali Lumsden is Regius Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Walter Scott Research Centre. The Centre aims to promote all aspects of Walter Scott’s work and the intellectual contexts for it and to explore his relevance for modern readers. It works closely with Abbotsford, Scott’s home in the Scottish Borders. Ali is also Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded project The Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry: Engaging New Audiences. 

Anna Fancett  

Anna Fancett is a Research Assistant at the Walter Scott Research Centre. Building on her doctoral research on the significance of familial representation in the novels of Walter Scott and Jane Austen, Anna has published articles in the Scottish Literary Review and the Wenshan Review, as well book chapters, blogs, and teaching resources. In 2020, she was the winner of the Jack Medal, which is awarded annually for the best article on a subject related to Reception or Diaspora in Scottish Literatures. She is currently working on a Walter Scott companion for McFarland’s nineteenth-century series.   

Natalie Tal Harries 

Natalie Tal Harries is a Research Fellow at the Walter Scott Research Centre, University of Aberdeen, working on the AHRC funded Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry project. She is also an ECR Fellow at the Institute of English Studies (University of London) where she has been working on the late Indian influences of P.B. Shelley. Natalie’s research interests are primarily focused on Romantic poetry, and she is particularly interested in the ways in which the varied and often ‘esoteric’ reading and interests of Romantic writers informed metaphysical exploration, transcendental experience and visionary expression in their poetry.    

Summary

Co-hosts Ian Grosz and Shailini Vinod talk to Jane Hughes about her work on contemporary life writing and memoir. All three are PhD students in creative writing at the University of Aberdeen. 

Inspired by her past career as a civil funeral celebrant, Jane was already writing an experimental memoir incorporating elements of fiction and irreverent humour when her mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in 2019. Overtaken by events which were not funny at all, Jane continued to write the memoir, incorporating raw details of her personal bereavement experience and collaging a variety of forms of written work into an unusual PhD project that reflects the complexity of grief and the fact that life events can be surprising… 

The episode considers the difficulties inherent in writing about personal grief. Jane speaks about her creative process and about using writing to make sense of immediate traumatic events. She also reflects on her use of creative writing as a therapeutic tool, both personally and in her work as a psychotherapist. The episode includes a reading of an excerpt from the memoir, which is a work in progress.

Bio 

Jane Hughes is a studying part-time for a PhD in creative writing with the University of Aberdeen. Jane has an MA in Scriptwriting for TV and Radio from the University of Salford and works in Manchester as a psychotherapist. Her essay, ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, appears in Essays in Life Writing, published by Routledge in 2022. Recent essays on attachment to place can be found online, published by Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and The Clearing, the online journal created by Little Toller books. Links to her recent published work are available at www.jane-hughes.net

Dr. Helen Lynch teaches Early Modern Literature & Creative Writing at University of Aberdeen. She has written two short story collections: The Elephant & the Polish Question (2009) and Tea for the Rent Boy (2018) as well as academic work on seventeenth century literature, gender and politics, including Milton & the Politics of Public Speech (2015). She has also written interactive online resources for school children, Beowulf for Beginners and The Knight with the Lion, and been Creative Director of WayWORD Festival since 2020. She also plays in ceilidh band Danse McCabre www.dansemccabre.com 

Bea Livesey-Stephens is a recent graduate of the MA(Hons) Language and Linguistics programme at the University of Aberdeen where she was one of the co-founders of the WayWORD Festival. She is currently the WORD Centre intern, taking on, in addition, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion role for the WayWORD Festival in 2022. She will be hosting a Gaming Panel at this year’s festival.

The WORD Centre for Creative Writing brings together writers, performers, artists, scholars and audiences of North-East Scotland through creative projects, collaborations, events and performances. 
 

From fiction and poetry, to creative non-fiction and collaborative mixed media, the projects of the Centre speak all the languages of North-East Scotland, from Doric and English, to Gaelic and Polish, engaging with its histories and cultural traditions. Reaching out beyond the university community to wider, diverse audiences, the projects of the Centre seek to connect and nurture North-East arts and artists, drawing a creative map of the region.

Founded in 2020 as part of University of Aberdeen's 525th anniversary celebrations, WayWORD is a student and youth-[ed, literary cross-arts festival for people of all ages, Consisting of workshops, panel discussions, exhibitions, author events and performance nights, the festival takes place annually over 5 days at the end of September. Tickets are FREE and the festival has BSL interpretation and captioning throughout.

Besides established creatives and new talent, the festival focusses on more unconventional forms of artistic expression: from comics, fan fiction, queer horror, song-writing, narrative gaming, to visual art, poetry, dance or spoken word performance: there should be something here for everyone.

 www.waywordfestival.com 

In this episode, hosts Ian Grosz and Lise Olsen interview Isabella Maria Engberg about her PhD project, which discusses how environmental portrayals in scientific travel writing from the long nineteenth century have been developed. It considers works by three scientific authors who have benefited greatly from what they have seen, gathered, and understood from their travels and have, with their scientific and literary output, contributed greatly towards humanity’s understanding of ecology. These authors and their travel narratives include Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799-1804 (1814-29), Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (second edition, 1845), and Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe (English: A Visit to Ceylon, 1883). The project investigates how journey narratives, written at different times and in different contexts, portray the interrelatedness of humans, organisms, and the rest of the material world. It seeks to get to grip with the transnational networks of knowledge between these travelling naturalists, the tensions between the “exciting” drama of encounter and the “dry” description of natural phenomena as well as the distinctly literary imagination necessary to conceive ecology.

Bio
Isabella Maria Engberg is currently undertaking a PhD programme in Comparative Literature. She also studied her undergraduate degree, MA (Hons) English-German, at the University of Aberdeen. During these years, she enjoyed both internships and an exchange year in Germany. Her academic interests are the environmental humanities, nineteenth century culture, and the relationship between science and literature. She is currently on an archival stay from April until August 2022 at the University of Jena, Germany, where she works with materials in the previous private residence of Ernst Haeckel, “Villa Medusa”. These are relevant to investigate how Haeckel’s diary and field notes turned into his published travel narrative. Isabella is supervised by Dr Helena Ifill, Dr Tara Beaney, and Prof Catherine Jones.   

Despite the major advancement in social justice made in the past decades, modern media is still lagging behind when it comes to diversity and the representation of marginalised communities. This poses an important question for the field of adaptation studies: what is adaptation’s role in this issue and how can it properly address issues of social justice and bring more diverse stories to popular media? In this episode, our co-hosts, Ian Grosz and Marianne Fossaluzza, invite May Toudic, a second year PhD student specialising in adaptation theory who argues that, by bringing new perspectives to older works of literature, re-visionary adaptation of Victorian women’s bildungsroman can bridge the gap between past, present and future and between individual and society in order to advocate for social justice. 

Here are some links relevant for the podcast episode.

• Murray Mysteries Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6XRl7bLCrYPHcliWyjpBHR
• Knöves Storytelling Ltd: https://knovesstorytellingcollective.wordpress.com/
• May Toudic Portfolio: https://maytoudic.notion.site/May-Toudic-Portfolio-a3b2070e531e4c93a27c39d9c15fec57
• Adaptation – Cinema and Media Studies: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0116.xml#obo-9780199791286-0116-div1-0003

Bio

May Toudic is a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on adaptation, modernisation and the relationship between 19th-century novels and 21st-century media. She enjoys all things storytelling – particularly in new media - and is currently writing and producing Murray Mysteries, an audio drama podcast adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.