Dear Blog,

We’ve had just the right number of applications for event 5 so everyone who applied will be getting a place. Confirmation letters will go out on Tuesday 8th March. Cristina da Costa is working hard on the resources page of event 4 too – there’s already some of the films that Paul Craddock took for us on the day including the vox pop interviews with LitSciMed students. See http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. I was really pleased with the evaluations for this event. Let’s hope we can replicate this experience for the next event!

I can announce, too, the publication of our Davy Letters website: http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/ created by the University of Salford’s Graeme Draper and Alex Fenton. This site allows you to search the Davy letters database, which currently holds information on 922 letters but which is growing daily. The database can be searched according to a number of fields (recipient name, where the original is held, etc etc), and constitutes the first stage in our project to publish Davy’s complete correspondence.

I’ve had a hectic few weeks. I gave my inaugural lecture on Tuesday 22nd February, an event I think I shall always remember. It was the loveliest thing; there were 160 people there, my friends, family, Romanticists, colleagues and some students. Thanks to the LitSciMed folk who came along. It was the most wonderful audience, full of well-wishers, and I felt very loved. The party afterwards was fun too!
Since then there’s been much culture, starting with seeing Simon Rattle conduct the Berlin Symphony Orchestra for Mahler’s fifth at the Royal Festival Hall; going to watch The Red Shoes with Secret Cinema in an old Tobacco Warehouse in Wapping (http://www.secretcinema.org/); watching Made in Dagenham as part of the 100th International Women’s Day celebrations with the TUC; and yesterday I went to see Nam June Paik’s exhibition at the Tate in Liverpoool.

One of the best things I did last week was to see David Peace (authors of the Red Riding Trilogy, Damned United, GB84, and other books). He was brilliant, really thoughtful and interesting. When he read from his novels it was very much like hearing poetry and in questions he told us that he was in fact thinking of writing a book-length poem at some point in the future. He was fascinating, really very inspiring. I urge people to read his books, though they are not for the faint of heart…

Tomorrow I give my Frankenstein lecture to the second year students and then have a series of one-to-one sessions offering help with their forthcoming essay before a session at 5pm run by our wonderful subject librarian Jen Earl to help the same students find relevant, quality material for the essay. How’s that for a good service? Wednesday I’m off to the University of Northumbria to give a paper in their research seminar series; I’m talking about the Davy letters project and it’s good to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve done so far and how much there still is to do.

More soon,

Sharon