Category: Insights

Alienation on the Strand; Solitude in Street Haunting

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 6 January 2021

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.

Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Studies Insights

#MedievalWiki October 2020 write up

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 16 December 2020

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!

Tags International Women's Day, Medieval Studies, MedievalWiki, Wikipedia, Wikipedia Gender Gap, Wikithon, Women in Medieval Studies

20th - 21st Centuries Insights Modernism

A Scratch ‘n’ sniff Ulysses

Post author By Harriet Thompson
Post date 18 November 2020

by Dr Jon Day

One of the loneliest things about life online, I’ve found, is that it denies us the full sensory range of human interaction. In lockdown I realised how much I missed not only seeing and hearing other people (sensory modes which Zoom can just about convey, even if unsatisfyingly) but how much I missed touching and even smelling other people.

Tags consciousness, human sensorium, interaction, James Joyce, Literature, Modernism, modernist olfaction, narrative, Novel Sensations, odour, perception, qualia, sensory experience, Ulysses, virtual

Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture Contemporary Cross-temporal Insights

Insight: #AbolitionistCurriculum

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 9 November 2020

Jon Ward and Rafael Lubner will be discussing #AbolitionistCurriculum at the English Department Virtual Research Hour on November 11th, 12.30 – 1.30. In this blog post the pair reflect on how the curriculum embraces Blackness and resists the structures of exclusion within ‘The University’ environment.

Tags #AbolitionistCurriculum, Abolitionist Curriculum, access, Black excellence, Black joy, Black love, Black organising, Black resistance, Blackness, exclusion, higher education, higher education institutions, neo-colonialism, reading, text

20th - 21st Centuries Contemporary Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Visual and Material Culture

From PhD to Novel

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 4 November 2020

Cover for the US edition of Sixteen Horses to be published by Flatiron Books

From the English department to creating games and interactive fiction, King’s PhD graduate Greg Buchanan recalls his path from academia to creative writing.

Tags Academia, author, careers, creative writing, doctorate, fiction, PhD