RSS 1.0Faculty of Humanities
The Faculty's primary commitment is to the provision of high-quality taught programmes, fully informed by scholarship and research. The Faculty also attaches great importance to its many and varied collaborative activities (local, regional, national and international), since these conspicuously enrich the provision the Faculty is able to offer. The most recent RAE submissions for English, History and TRS have been particularly successful.
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Book Review of British Battles 493-937: Mount Badon to Brunanburh by Andrew BreezeA review of Andrew Breeze, British Battles 493-937: Mount Badon to Brunanburh (London: Anthem Press, 2021).
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Stigmatizing Space: Jewish East London at the Fin de SiecleLondon’s East End – a quarter buttressing the city’s docklands – has long been a place of arrival for migrants both domestic and foreign. Characterised in the 19th century by dense housing, tenement blocks, large factories, and low-grade workshops, it was also an area subject to pervasive stigmatisation by on-lookers. It was a stigmatisation which drew upon the area’s reputation as a ‘notorious’ slum quarter and a ‘hotbed’ for crime, complicated by its established status as a reception centre for ‘foreigners’. The large-scale arrival and settlement of Jews from Eastern Europe after 1880 cemented but also extended and diversified such narratives. The rhetoric of the ‘slum’ was now codified with a new, distinctly antisemitic way of describing and degenerating space. The East End slum quarter became ‘the ghetto’, textile factories became ‘sweatshops’, and the East End itself was imaginatively transformed to become ‘little Jerusalem’. Journalists, philanthropists, politicians, novelists, flaneurs and voyeurs all contributed to this spatial lexicon. So too did members of the established Jewish community in Britain both internalise and regurgitate such language as a means to distinguish themselves from their ‘alien’ brethren. This chapter explores the emergence and evolution of this linguistic landscape within cultural discourse of the period, arguing that it was the pre-existing identity of the East End itself as a place apart which allowed this vocabulary to form.
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Why Were They Not Radicalized? Young Members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Aftermath of Egypt's 2013 Military CoupWhile many young members of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood became politically disengaged in the wake of the 2013 military coup, others resorted to violence. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in 2016/17, this article investigates the forces of radicalization among younger Brotherhood members after the coup. Rather than there being a positive correlation between repression and radicalization, I argue that the majority of rank-and-file movement members remained inclined against radicalism due to the effects of state repression, organizational schism, and transformative personal experiences.
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Der Aufstand vom 17. Juni 1953 im kollektiven Gedächtnis und Bewusstsein der Magdeburger vor 1990Eine Untersuchung und Analyse der kollektiven Erinnerung an den Aufstand vom 17. Juni 1953 unter Bürgern der Stadt Magdeburg.
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The Sensuous Pastoral: Vision and Text in Pre-Raphaelite ArtMuch of the recent scholarly criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has focused on the relationship between Artist and Muse. Dinah Roe, in her introduction to her edited collection of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry, states that ‘Pre-Raphaelitism maintained strict demarcations between women’s roles (as muses) and men’s (as creators).’ This paper, however, will suggest that through the use of shared pastoral metaphors and imagery, female Pre-Raphaelite poets gained a sense of agency through appropriating techniques used by male poets. This was also further encouraged by Pre-Raphaelite muses’ writing of poetry, and the highly visual intertextuality between portraiture and the written word. The minutiae of detail employed in descriptions of pastoral scenes in such poems as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, ‘Genius in Beauty’ and ‘Silent Noon’ (amongst others) are explored to a depth that exposes the Pre-Raphaelites’ use of the natural to explore sensuality: ‘Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, - the finger-points look through like rosy blooms’ writes Dante Gabriel Rossetti in ‘Silent Noon’. This marriage of body and nature, with an intense attention to sensual visuality, is highly characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites almost erotic evolution of Romantic literary sensibilities. Similar imagery is employed in the works of female Pre-Raphaelite writers. Elizabeth Siddal, most well-known for being Dante’s muse for a number of his artworks, as well as his sister, Christina Rossetti employ a similar sensuous focus on natural detail to exemplify their position as objects of desire. Rossetti’s use of the Petrarchan Sonnet form, most commonly used as a medieval expression of courtly love, also contributes to this idea. This paper will explore how the patterns of such imagery react to the pastoral eroticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and how this appropriation may be seen to reclaim feminine sexuality and desire. At the core of the argument will be the intensely visual relationship between muse and artist, and the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in conversions of image to text, and text to image.
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Trains and Brains: Splitting the Self in Sensation FictionThis article will study the relationships between mid-nineteenth century developments in the understanding of psychology and the influence of rail networks. It will take a selection of Sensation fiction as its case study, a genre that has already been detailed to have an intimate relationship with the railways. Considered by some cultural commentators to be ‘railway literature’ in itself, this genre depicts what Nicholas Daly calls ‘the modernisation of the senses’. Railway travel, and the rapidity of new modes of modernity, often dictate the movement of Sensation narratives, and this paper aims to explore the psychological effects of such innovation on the psyches of key characters within the chosen texts. Critical analysis will be mainly focused on three texts, each from a different author in order to show the diverse representation of railway travel’s links with issues of the mind and self. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret will be analysed with the mental states of both the titular Lady Audley and her investigator Robert Audley, and their use of rail travel, in mind. Wilkie Collins’s No Name will be examined in terms of the effects that rail travel has on identity, as well as how the technology is used as a plot device within the sensation narrative. Bolstering the literary analysis will be an examination of the effect of the railway on social and individual psyches, as detailed by both historians and contemporary commentators. The paper draws many ideas from the work of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s text The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space; of particular interest are his Marxist interpretations of the space of the train carriage, and the essential liminality associated with it. As well as this, nineteenth-century psychology will also be addressed, including the influence of industry and networks on Herbert Spencer’s theories of Social Darwinism, and Sigmund Freud’s notion of the fugueur – a figure that emerged through his research and writing on trains and rail travel that subsequently influenced the quintessentially nineteenth-century idea of the flâneur. My paper will attempt to expose the psychological influence of rail travel on the individual self through an analysis of Sensation fiction, and how discourses of the two phenomena (railways and psychology) often seemed to share conceptual frameworks and lexical fields.
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V for VikingWhat is the most famous ‘Viking funeral’ in modern popular culture? I present a case for the funeral of V in the dystopian fiction of the 1980s graphic novel V for Vendetta and its 2005 film adaptation. Building on earlier roots, the nineteenth-century creation of the Vikings and the Viking Age (c.750–1050) took place through fiction, literary and historical scholarship but also through prominent and influential archaeological investigations of artefacts, sites and monuments in which funerary practices were central and captured the popular imagination. Tied to concepts of feud, fate and faith, this fascination with Old Norse deathways and concepts of the afterlife focused on the conception that the Vikings burned their dead in boats or ships set adrift on open water. By tackling one manifestation of this modern engagement with this imagined Viking past, this epilogue serves as a case study for rethinking the complexity and entanglement of Viking themes in contemporary arts and media, but also to rethink academic public engagements, teaching and research in both Viking and Vikingist studies, and thus medieval/medievalist scholarship more broadly, to counter extremist appropriations.
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Public Viking Research in Museums and BeyondThe popularity of the Vikings remains a mixed blessing for archaeologists and heritage practitioners; they are ‘victims of their own success’ on multiple registers (Croix 2015). This is all the more so because, over the last decade at least, we have been unquestionably living through a global ‘Viking revival’ (Birkett 2019:4). Today, Vikings are a focus of identity, faith, politics, consumerism and escapism in which archaeological sources are drawn upon in rich and complex fashions. I have three critical points to make which aim to support and extend, not detract from or devalue, Sindbæk’s insights and inferences: ‘where’s the evidence?’; ‘what’s the context?’; ‘what do we do about it?’ These points together lead me to propose we must collectively adopt a refreshed and reinvigorated agenda to pursue dedicated and sustained ‘Public Viking Research’ into today’s Vikingisms in museums and elsewhere.
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Human remains in ‘non-burial’ contextsA characteristic feature of the mortuary record of Mesolithic Europe is the variability in the depositional contexts from which human remains have been recovered. As well as clearly defined burials, skeletal material has also been recorded from occupation deposits, middens, caves, stream channels and bodies of water – the ‘non-burial’ contexts of this chapter’s title. The character of this material also varies, from isolated finds of single skeletal elements, to the disarticulated remains of partial bodies, assemblages of specific elements (notably skulls), and the commingled remains of multiple individuals. In some cases, they represent the only evidence for the deposition of human remains at a site, while in others they occur (both spatially and temporally) alongside inhumation and cremation burials. This chapter reviews human remains from a variety of non-burial contexts, defined principally as those remains that were not inhumed as complete bodies, and explores the contribution that this material can make to our understanding of funerary practice and belief in the European Mesolithic.
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Working with God: the practice of connecting Christian faith with everyday workAgainst the background of moves, especially in the Church of England, to close the so-called Sunday-Monday gap and encourage whole-life discipleship, this thesis explores the ways that Christians connect their faith with their everyday work in practice. The research is based on analysis of semi-structed interviews with thirteen self-identifying Christians in non-faith-based paid employment who were associated with an evangelical Anglican church in the South East of England. Working with the theological consensus that sees work as co-operation with God, I found that the dimension of closeness, or proximity, to God and God’s purposes characterised the most salient connections between faith and work. Using categories from David Miller’s The Integration Box/Profile, participants tended to experience their work most strongly as co-operation with God when they could perceive God’s purposes being achieved at the closest, micro, level of their everyday activities. This tended to be more salient than a perceptually more distant connection at the mezzo (corporate) and macro (societal) levels of the overall activity and purposes of the enterprise. Such micro level connections were reinforced by experiences of God’s presence and providential activity at that level, framed as personal encounters with God. The more that participants experienced these close connections in their workplace experience, the more they felt that they were working with, as opposed to merely for, God. This suggests that teaching an overarching, macro-level, theological framework within which daily work finds a place will not be sufficiently salient to overcome the Sunday-Monday gap on its own. In several cases the experience of close co-operation with God was associated with deliberate practices of attentiveness and reflection. The evidence suggests, however, that further encouragement and training in such practices, perhaps especially in a workplace group setting, could have a significant impact on workplace discipleship. In identifying the significance of proximity to God and God’s purposes and connecting the experience of proximity with particular Christian practices, this thesis resources practitioners aiming to nurture workplace discipleship.
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Patrick Modiano parolier (1967-1970) : à la recherche d’une voixPatrick Modiano, Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, has had an abundant activity as a songwriter between 1967 and 1970. Together with his friend from prep school, Hughes de Courson, they were writing songs for artists as prestigious as Françoise Hardy, Régine and Myriam Anissimov, famous for her biographies of Primo Levi and Romain Gary. In this article, we explore the core themes of some of those songs, asking ourselves to what extent they reflect literary themes and characters Modiano develops in his novels. We argue that his years of songwriting have allowed Modiano to find his voice as an author. With Modiano having found the sober elegance which is still marking his writing in Les boulevards de ceinture, he abruptly stopped writing songs, with one exception in 2018. Modiano dans la chanson1« C’est le soir où près du métro, nous avions croisé Modiano »...Vincent Delerm, chef de file de la Nouvelle scène française du début des années 2000, relate dans sa chanson « Le baiser Modiano » une rencontre nocturne, inattendue avec l’écrivain révéré. Delerm compte parmi les auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes que l’on peut qualifier de littéraires dans le sens où un certain souci de la qualité du texte régit ses chansons, lesquelles abordent, qui plus est, souvent des sujets littéraires. La présence d’un écrivain dans l’univers de Delerm n’a d’emblée rien de surprenant. (Obergöker 2008 ; Remy s.d.)C’est le soir où près du métroNous avons croisé Modiano Le soir où tu ne voulais pas croireQue c’était lui sur le trottoir Le soir où j’avais dit tu vois
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Urban VarietiesThe investigation of urban varieties is founded in the remit of sociolinguistics: to investigate the social context(s) of language. A sociolinguistic investigation of an urban variety primarily focuses on internal (those governed by the language itself) and external factors (those governed by social factors) to try and answer these key questions: how does language vary in this variety?; how has it changed/will change?; and ultimately, do the patterns of variation and change observed in this variety mirror that of other investigations? The overall aim of answering these questions is to understand the mechanisms that motivate language variation and change. The study of urban varieties will be explained in the context of Labovian investigations in the US, which largely pioneered sociolinguistic investigation, before turning to investigations carried out in the UK
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Don Cupitt: prophet, public intellectual and pioneer Prophet without honour: the marginalization of Don CupittThis article is the first of three that will evaluate the work and legacy of the Cambridge non-realist theologian and philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt. We begin by suggesting that Cupitt might be depicted as a ‘prophet without honour’ in both his ecclesiastical home of the Church of England and at the University of Cambridge, where he spent most of his professional life. This is based on the observation that, after a promising early career, Cupitt never received the ecclesiastical preferment or academic promotion that many argued he deserved. This arguably represents a missed opportunity for both Church and academy, because Cupitt is more accurately understood not as an enemy of religion but as essentially an ecclesiastical insider whose chief motivation was to uphold the contemporary relevance and credibility of Christianity.
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Lateglacial to Mid-Holocene Vegetation History in the Eastern Vale of Pickering, Northeast Yorkshire, UK: Pollen Diagrams from Palaeolake FlixtonPalaeolake Flixton, in the eastern Vale of Pickering in northeast Yorkshire, UK, existed as open water during the Lateglacial and early to mid-Holocene, until hydroseral succession and gradual terrestrialisation changed it to an area of fen and basin peatland by the later mid-Holocene. The environs of the lake were occupied by Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic people over thousands of years and many Early Mesolithic sites, in particular, have been found located along the ancient lake edge, including the paradigm site for the British Early Mesolithic at Star Carr, where occupation occurred over several centuries. We have analysed eleven sediment cores, distributed in most parts of the palaeolake area, for pollen and stratigraphic data with which to reconstruct lake development and vegetation history. These new diagrams augment earlier pollen studies from the western part of the lake, particularly in the Star Carr area and near other major Mesolithic sites around Seamer Carr. Especially informative are a long core from the deepest part of the lake; cores that document the Lateglacial as well as early Holocene times, and evidence for the later Mesolithic that helps to balance the high density of Late Mesolithic sites known from research in the adjacent uplands of the North York Moors. There are many records of charcoal in the deposits but, especially for the earliest examples, it is not always possible to tie them firmly to either human activity or natural causes. Overall, the new and previously existing diagrams provide evidence for the spatial reconstruction of vegetation history across this important wetland system, including (a) for the progression of natural community successions within the wetland and on the surrounding dryland (b) the influence of climate change in bringing about changes in woodland composition and (c) for discussion of the possibility of human manipulation of the vegetation in the Late Upper Palaeolithic, Early and Late Mesolithic. Results show that climate was the main driver of longer-term vegetation change. Centennial-scale, abrupt climate events caused significant vegetation reversals in the Lateglacial Interstadial. The Lateglacial vegetation was very similar throughout the lake hinterland, although some areas supported some scrubby shrub rather than being completely open. Immigration and spread of Holocene woodland taxa comprised the familiar tree succession common in northern England but the timings of the establishment and the abundance of some individual tree types varied considerably around the lake margins because of edaphic factors and the effects of fire, probably of human origin. Woodland successions away from proximity to the lake were similar to those recorded in the wider landscape of northern England and produced a dense, homogenous forest cover occasionally affected by fire.
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Medieval Chester RetoldMedieval Chester Retold. An exciting look at the medieval city with stories told through the objects everyday people used. This exhibition is part of a wider Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries, 1000-1700, led by University of Chester and University of Oxford.
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Early Christianity and WarThis essay examines the role of war in the New Testament and Early Christianity.
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Martyrdom and Persecution in the New TestamentExamines the phenomena of martyrdom and persecution as reflected in the New Testament
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Creating and Contesting Christian MartyrdomThis essay examines the way in which martyrdom narratives are not primarily accounts of a death, but literature that reflects a wider conflict in which the martyr represents a community against their real or perceived enemies. It examines the process of martyr making.
