Dear blog,
I can report that I still have a cold and had very little voice for a couple of days this week, which made teaching quite tricky. We are now in the last throws of term. I have (a few minutes ago!) finished the four lots of marking that I had to do, but there’s still next week to go, with MA teaching on Conrad, Genette, and Brooks on top of the usual things to get through. Then, I might be able to get back to some research in the week before Christmas, something I’ve not managed to do for the past four weeks.
It’s been a tough but interesting week. On Monday a delegation from King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia arrived, to be taught Research Methods here at Salford for a fortnight. The group comprise a real range of disciplines (Veterinarians, Arid Agriculture, a Librarian, and a number of English Language academics) and range from Professor to Assistant Professor, Lecturers, and an Administrator. For the welcome dinner on Monday evening we went to Manchester United football ground at Old Trafford where we had a tour (of the changing rooms, the players’ lounge, which was surprisingly unglamorous, and had a look at the pitch). We had dinner in the Boardroom. It was good to meet the participants of the Research Methods course because the next day I was teaching the first of my two sessions, this one on archival research. I tried to make it seem relevant to those working in other disciplines than English and History. I used the Davy Letters project (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) as an example and took along some copies of letters for participants to transcribe. It was great fun actually and really interesting to meet colleagues from other disciplines and from another continent.
On Tuesday evening I attended Raymond Tallis’s talk, which was part of the VC’s Lecture Series here at Salford (http://staff.salford.ac.uk/news/details/2584). I like Tallis’s work, though I have some doubts too, and he’s a great speaker. He was talking about his new book, Aping Mankind, which discusses what he calls the ‘two pillars of unwisdom’: Darwinitis and Neuromania. Tallis’s scientific credentials are clear and he’s of course convinced that Darwin was right, but he thinks that biology is not sufficient to account for us as humans. We are not solely animals, he argues; we are both part of and apart from nature. It was interesting and thought-provoking and I have a degree of sympathy with his ideas.
On Wednesday I was internal examiner to a PhD thesis on a labouring-class poet of the late nineteenth-century, Alexander Anderson. Anderson was also known as ‘Surfaceman’; he was a railway man as well as a poet and is best remembered now for his children’s poem ‘Cuddle Doon’ (he was Scottish too!). I learned a great deal from the thesis and the student had done some excellent archival work, recovering his work, including finding an unpublished poem ‘The Death of Lazarus’.
I want to mention another blog, http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/scienceandculture/, which offers an account of the Science and Culture Workshop at Exeter that I attended at the start of the semester. Neurological approaches to literature were a big topic there too.
Finally, we have a doctoral studentship available for an October 2012 start and would especially welcome applications in the fields of the Gothic, women’s writing, literature and science, post-holocaust literature, modern poetry or periodicals and print culture. Details are here: http://www.salford.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/fees-and-funding/ahrc-studentships/doctoral-award-in-english. Please get in touch if you’d like to study with me.
All best,
Sharon