Category Archives: Insights

20th - 21st Centuries, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theory, American Studies, Culture, Text and History, Gender and Sexuality, Insights

2021 Ellen Craft Essay Prize Awarded to PhD Student Katie Arthur

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By Professor Mark Turner, PGR Lead

It is a pleasure to announce to the KCL English community that the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) has awarded the 2021 Ellen Craft Essay Prize to one of our PhD students, Katie Arthur, for her brilliant essay, ‘Arousing Disgust: Visceral Configurations of Obscenity through Literal, Literary, and Governmental Bodies in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1957)’.

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Early Modern and Shakespeare, Insights

Bard Takes: A new podcast supported by KCL English Department

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What do we really think about Shakespeare? As one of the world’s most iconic writers, we all have certain preconceptions and biases about him and his work which can impact how we watch, read and study them. The Bard Takes Podcast follows a Shakespeare Studies student exploring these preconceptions and the truth behind Shakespeare’s work, with guests including staff and students from King’s College London, Shakespeare’s Globe and beyond.

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Insights

The Joy of Reading Off-Syllabus

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by Nell Prince

In his third memoir, May Week Was In June, Clive James writes of his inability to stick to the syllabus:

Out of the three terms of my second and last year as an undergraduate, one and a half had gone by before I could bring myself even to sit down and assess the magnitude of what I had not yet done in the way of preparing to satisfy the examiners. When I finally faced the issue, I quickly realised that I would have a better chance of satisfying them if I offered them my body.

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20th - 21st Centuries, Culture, Text and History, Insights, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Alienation on the Strand; Solitude in Street Haunting

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WOOLF’S WRITING HAS BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE FOR SO LONG I NO LONGER KNOW IF IT TAUGHT ME TO SEE THE WORLD THIS WAY OR JUST TAUGHT ME TO NOTICE THAT I DO.

– TRACY SEELEY

There is perhaps no greater comfort nor reward granted by reading than resonance. It is an indescribable liberation to have our feelings corroborated; to sift through the works of writers centuries past and happen upon an unassuming strand of words that instantly articulates the inarticulable, that echoes an acute emotion lying dormant within. These discoveries serve as whispers through time, as a consoling hand-squeeze in the ether. In my first year studying on the Strand, Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure offered me this solace.

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Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Studies, Insights

#MedievalWiki October 2020 write up

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By Fran Allfrey and Beth Whalley

After our first Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in March 2018, we always had in the back of our minds that we wanted to host another wikithon. And while the pandemic has put paid to any in-person meet-ups for the past eight months, we thought we would make the most of this period of physical distancing to gather participants from across multiple time zones and engage in some collective, virtual editing! Thanks to the generous support of Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin, 16 of us were able to get together on the 28th October for three hours of training, discussing, and editing, all done via Zoom. See below for our outcomes.

Screenshot of our Zoom meeting – the final eight participants standing after 3 hours of training and editing!

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