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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The Dilemma of Chaplaincy to Chieftaincy in Ghana for Pentecostal DenominationsThe lack of Pentecostal denominational ministry with chieftaincy in Ghana is a missional challenge, and it is an area that is under-researched. In order to address the dilemma of Christian chaplaincy to chieftaincy, a thorough investigation into the relationship between Christianity and chieftaincy is necessary for the formulation and implementation of missional policies. This dissertation uses a historical account with a qualitative research approach in the present, to examine whether chaplains can be appointed to the Institution of Chieftaincy (IoC) and how that might work. Starting from a position of opposition to involvement with the IoC in the early 20th Century there was no way Pentecostals would participate in then pagan perceived rituals. So, it is revolutionary to suggest that Pentecostals can become chiefs and yet now many are, so that there are Christian chiefs’ associations. Therefore, my proposal is a practical one: to offer chaplaincy like ministry to chiefs, Christian or not, from a Pentecostal position so as to have a missional support from churches to chiefs’ councils and thus to the community. I interviewed 50 participants from Christian and traditional leaders to determine their experience and view of Christian ministry to the IoC. The data were analysed using thematic analysis that revealed three global themes: Perceptions of the IoC; Role of chaplaincy in transforming the IoC; Calls for chaplaincy involvement in chieftaincy; along with thirteen organizing themes and twenty-one basic themes. According to the data, chaplaincy could facilitate bridging the gap between both institutions through the provision of spiritual care and expressed the need for active Christian participation with chieftaincy. In order to facilitate chaplaincy as a missional practice to the IoC, the following recommendations are made, that: there is a need for developing a) biblical alternatives relating to chieftaincy cultural practices as seen from the data; b) a theology of chieftaincy; c) a theology of both the anointing for leadership for chiefs and kings and d) the role of chaplains as prophets and priests to chiefs.
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‘All the figures I used to see’: using Cognitive Grammar to grapple with rhythmic and intertextual meaning-making in Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’This article constitutes an application of Cognitive Grammar and Zbikowski's theory of Musical Grammar to Radiohead's 'Pyramid Song'.
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Les journaux de confinement de Leïla Slimani et de Marie Darrieussecq – Histoire d’un malentenduImmediately after French President Macron declared the lockdown of the country, French writers Marie Darrieussecq and Leïla Slimani have published their lockdown journals, Slimani in Le Monde, Darrieussecq in Le Point. However the reception was indeed problematic, in that most critics insisted on their class privilege, romanisation of an unbearable experience for normal citizens, to mention a few. Our text explores the reasons for this problematic reception: we show that the lockdown has brought to the surface a whole set of traumata closely linked to the German Occupation. What is more, we explore the changing role of the author in French society. The author is not the nearly sacred institution Roland Barthes describes in his Ecrivain en vacances, he has become a celebrity like any other. The diary (journal intime) has strong female connotations, thus allowing for misogynistic stereotypes to flourish. Finally, we argue that Annie Ernaux's Journal du dehors is a more appropriate literary approach to the urgency of sanitary, economic and social crisis.
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Touching, feeling, smelling and sensing history through objects. New Opportunities from the 'material turn'Lots has been written in recent years about how history teachers can bring academic scholarship into the classroom. Here, this interest in academic practice a step further, examining how pupils can engage directly with the kinds of sources to which historians are increasingly turning their attention is highlighted. Building on a funded research network that brought together academic history and art history departments, Michael Bird and his co-authors worked with museum curators and trainee teachers to bring artefacts from the rich (but often overlooked) collections of their local museum into schools.
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Textiles: 1400-1700A summary of Textiles 1400-1700.
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Mai 68, une approche transatlantiqueThe book is the result of a workshop held in 2018 at the German Association of French Studies in Osnabrück. It raises questions around May 68 as an international event, particularly at the Francophone periphery, in Montréal, in the Canadian Maritimes, in Belgium.
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The Quebec spring, a new May 68?May 68 seems to have become the global matrix for youth protest and indeed one of the first globalised rebellions. Powerful images of young people challenging the establishment circulated quickly around the globe , thus creating a language of dissent encapsulated in slogans, posters, music, happenings. In 2012, when students in the province of Quebec protested massively against an increase of their tuition fees, many commentators in the media compared this event to “May 68”. Indeed, we find striking similarities between Paris 1968 and Montreal 2012. But are things really that easy? We will explore in how far a common set of signs and symbols might, potentially, hide deep structural differences..
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The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, Media Engagement and Public BenefitThis article examines the recent engagement with media by the closed Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (pbcc). Historically the pbcc have been reluctant to engage with mainstream media, preferring instead to keep their own council. However, the rejection by the Charity Commission for England and Wales of an application by a pbcc trust for charitable status proved to be a catalyst for significant and sustained media engagement. The concept of mediatization is utilised as a metaprocess to frame the way the pbcc engaged with media in order to demonstrate how they provide ‘public benefit’ to the wider community, which was crucial to the successful gaining of charitable status.
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Reading Across the Human-Animal Boundary: The Animalising Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4A major aspect of the narrative in Daniel 4 is the imagery employed to describe the affliction received by Nebuchadnezzar when he is driven from his throne. It is plain that as part of his affliction he will live as an animal, however the degree to which he actually becomes an animal is less clear. This unusual depiction of the king’s affliction has intrigued numerous subsequent readers and has provoked two predominant lines of interpretation: either that Nebuchadnezzar undergoes a physical metamorphosis of some kind into an animal form; or diverse other ways of reading the text that specifically preclude or deny an animal transformation of the king. This thesis addresses such bifurcation of interpretative opinion about Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction, examining why such interpretation is so divided and demonstrating ultimately how neither of these traditional interpretations best reflect the narrative events in Daniel 4. Firstly, I survey the range of previous interpretations of Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction and how they can broadly be grouped into these two general trends. I examine in detail the various texts and forms of the narrative to show how metamorphic interpretations of Daniel 4 are largely reliant upon later developments within the textual tradition and are not present in the earliest edition of Nebuchadnezzar’s animalising affliction. However, while the various editions of Daniel 4 seem to contain no explicit evidence that a metamorphosis was ever intended, I also show that it is equally inadequate to state that the king does not undergo an animal transformation at all. Turning to the wider ancient Near Eastern context of the Danielic narrative, I examine a range of Mesopotamian texts which appear to conceive of the human-animal boundary as being indicated primarily in relation to possession or lack of the divine characteristic of wisdom. Demonstrating how various Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish texts appear to reflect the same conceptual idea, I argue that the narrative in Daniel 4, through the king’s loss of reason, in fact represents a far more significant categorical change from human to animal than has hitherto been recognised. This thesis therefore demonstrates that both traditional readings of Nebuchadnezzar’s animalising affliction are inadequate. Read instead in the context of this the narrative of Daniel 4 describes a more subtle yet much more profound crossing of the human-animal boundary.
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Commerce and Consumers: The Ubiquitous Chest of the Late Middle AgesContrary to their ubiquity within written, visual, and material sources, chests have largely remained overlooked in studies of the late Middle Ages. Bill Brown’s “thing theory” helps to explain the ways in which chests can transform from unnoticed “things” in the background to meaningful “objects” when viewed through their entanglements with commercial, consumer, political, and moral concerns. The interdisciplinary study of chests in the late Middle Ages brings together a range of evidence including inventories, guild accounts, court pleas, contemporary writings, images, and material culture from Burgundy, France, and England.
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‘He was struck out. Deleted’: We Need to Talk about Wesley in Nicola Barker’s BehindlingsThis article provides a poststructural reading of the character of Wesley in Nicola Barker’s 2002 novel Behindlings, which is broadly informed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on being and community and Jacques Derrida’s thinking on khōra, as well as other established poststructural paradigms. It contends that the novel simultaneously engages with these ideas and exceeds them. Wesley is the void-at-the-heart of his own ‘philosophy’: ‘He was hollow. He was empty […] He was a vacuum. He was struck-out. Deleted. He was nothing’. And he is everything as well at one and the same time. It is the classic poststructural paradox – receiving everything while possessing nothing – that makes meaning possible. And that is the argument: the signifier, the empty sign for some, the palimpsest for others, here is simply Wesley. However, my argument is that the characterisation of Wesley challenges and complicates such readings, deliberately. This article will demonstrate how the novel repeatedly sullies the theories it implicates by introducing a persistent taint to the main vehicle used to articulate the theory, the protagonist himself, that ‘puerile […] shithead’, Wesley.
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Television and the Bible in American Popular CultureThis essay examines the Bible in American television, focusing in particular on the twenty-first century. It suggests that there are three broad categories which may helpfully illustrate and encompass the diverse ways in which the Bible appears and/or is utilized: (i) educating about the Bible (e.g., documentaries); (ii) dramatizing the Bible (renditions of biblical stories); and (iii) drawing on the Bible (the impact or use of the Bible in other television programs). Examining each of these in turn, this essay highlights the prevalence of the Bible within television and thus within American popular culture more generally, as well as considering some of the myriad ways in which it has been read, used, and interpreted. In particular, it endeavors to show how the medium can function as a tool for both reflecting and promoting levels of biblical literacy among its audience.
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From Celebrating Diversity to British Values: The Changing Face of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in Britain. In the two decades since the inaugural ceremony took place successive British government have sought to position themselves at the very forefront of Holocaust remembrance and education on a national, international, and supranational, level. As such, the Holocaust has emerged as a dominant socio-political symbol in twenty-first century Britain even though the event intersects with the British experience in few ways, in part, due to the lack of connections the country has to the sites of deportation or extermination. Though the increase in activities for HMD suggests a growing engagement with the Holocaust in British society this obscures the complex discourses surrounding the day, and inherent tensions that have existed within it since its inception in 1999. This chapter explores some of these by tracing the shift in Holocaust remembrance in Britain since the establishment of HMD in 2001, considering the political tensions surrounding it and the changing politicised messages being promoted by it. It is the position of this chapter that, evermore, HMD is being utilised as a means by which to evoke specific values for the furthering of very particular political agendas.
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The Limits of Anglo-American Cooperation in Cuba, 1945–1959Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, British governments and diplomats in Havana sought to protect their interests in Cuba, always sensitive to reactions from Washington – a vital transatlantic ally with a significant political and economic stake in the Caribbean island. After the Second World War, the allies continued their wartime cooperation over sugar supplies, with Cuba’s mainstay export still important to Britain’s refining industry and ongoing food rationing. Following two democratically-elected but highly corrupt Cuban governments, both the US State Department and the British Foreign Office came to recognise the benefits of strongman Fulgencio Batista’s abrupt return to Cuba’s political scene in 1952. Everything changed, however, when the Fidel Castro-led anti-Batista insurgency gained strength between late 1956 and 1958, and London and Washington became increasingly concerned about a political upheaval beyond US control. The issue of arms sales to Cuba became a touchstone not only of US and British policy toward Batista’s regime, but also of Anglo-American cooperation. When it came, Castro’s revolutionary triumph questioned the strength of US hegemony in its hemisphere.
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Charlotte Brontë's Gothic Fragment: 'The Story of Willie Ellin'Charlotte Brontë’s eighteen-page fragment, ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, written shortly after the publication of Villette in 1853, combines the gothic and realism and uses multiple narrators to tell a disturbing story of cruelty towards a child. The generic instability and disordered temporal framework of this fragment make it unlike anything Brontë had previously written, yet it has attracted the attention of few scholars. Those who have discussed it have condemned it as a failure; the later fragment ‘Emma’, also left incomplete by the author’s premature death, has been seen as the more likely beginning of a successor to Villette. ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ reveals Brontë at her most experimental as she explores the use of different narrative voices, including that of an unnamed genderless ‘ghost’, to tell a story from different perspectives. It also shows Brontë representing a child’s experience of extreme physical abuse which goes far beyond the depictions of chastisement in Jane Eyre (1847). This essay argues that ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ affords rich insights into Brontë’s ideas and working practices in her final years, suggesting that it should be more widely acknowledged as a unique aspect of Brontë’s oeuvre, revealing the new directions she may have taken had she lived to complete another novel.
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Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and AfterlivesThis edited collection offers a timely reflection on Charlotte Brontë's life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth in 2016. Brontë's legacy continues to evolve and the new essays in this volume, covering the period from her first publication to the present day, explain why she has remained at the forefront of global literary cultures. Taking a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, the volume examines areas such as genre, narrative style, national and regional identities, sexuality, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings. The contributors to this volume offer innovative interpretations of the rich variety of afterlives enjoyed by characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema and television, on the stage and on the web. Bringing the story of Charlotte's legacy up to date, the essays analyse obituaries, vlogs, stage and screen adaptations, fan fiction and erotic makeovers, showing that Charlotte Brontë's influence has been manifold and an enduring feature of the feminist movement.
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Utopia’s Extinction: the Anthroposcenic Landscapes of Ursula K. Le GuinIn the Anthropocene epoch, the utopian prospect which has structured civilizational development throughout recorded history is extinguished almost entirely. Our anthropocentric fantasies of dominion over the natural world have proven harmful not only to the biosphere we inhabit, but to the continued existence of our own species. Instead, new conceptualizations which foreground the role of humanity within its environment must take precedence. Intricate portrayals of humanity’s interdependence within its planetary environment—and illustrations of the damage that our daily lives inflict upon the natural world—have long been apparent in the Science Fiction genre. By emphasising the importance of fostering and recognizing our species’ symbiotic relationship with its natural world through practices of daily life, the Anthroposcenic landscapes of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction texts exert a posthuman vision which refutes anthropocentric ideologies, and decenters the notion of progress as an eschatology. Accordingly, this article closely analyses three texts of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle which particularly exemplify her Anthroposcenic objective; The Word for World is Forest (1972); Planet of Exile (1966); and City of Illusions(1967). These texts extrapolate the Anthropocene epoch into a cosmic paradigm, and so demonstrate the extinction of utopian potential it personifies vividly.
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The Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment: The Development of British Airborne Technology, 1940-1950The evolution of British airborne warfare cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the technological development required to convert the detail contained in the doctrine and concept into operational reality. Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment is a detailed investigation of the British technological investment in an airborne capability and analyses whether the new technology was justifiable, or indeed, entirely achievable.
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Fortress Salopia: Exploring Shropshire's Military History from the Prehistoric Period to the Twentieth CenturyFortress Salopia is the culmination of contributions from heritage and historic professionals, practising archaeologists and academic historians that explores the unique military past of the county of Shropshire from the prehistoric period to the 20th century. Shropshire is one of the most characteristic counties of the Welsh Marches and occupied a strategic position between England and Wales. Consequently, the county boasts the highest numbers of Iron Age hillforts in England and the greatest density of Motte & Bailey castles. The archaeological remains that adorn the landscape are a prescient reminder that Shropshire was once a frontier battleground, although such reminders are often lost amongst the picturesque rural landscape that prevails today.
