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Easington Colliery 1984. Photo by Keith Pattison Dr Peter Hayes has published a chapter entitled 'Riots in Thatcher's Britain' in Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He takes a fresh look at three violent confrontations during Margaret Thatcher's period as Prime Minister: the inner city riots, the Miners' Strike and The Poll Tax Riot.  The chapter suggests that Thatcher's response to the inner city riots was not one of mere condemnation as she recognised that racist policing and unemployment were contributory factors. It explains how the decision not to hold a strike ballot caused some of the violence in the Miners' Strike, and contributed to its failure. Finally it considers how the Poll Tax Riot reflected the broader unpopularity of the tax.  This was not only because the poll tax was seen as being unfair but also because local governments had deliberately set the new charge

Dr Geoff Nash’s article 'Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s Quest for the Religion of Modernity' has just been published in the latest issue of Religion & Literature . His article shows how Renan and Arnold’s search for a suitable religion for modernity found a focus in Gobineau’s writings about Persian Shi’ism and Babism. Each descried in these manifestations of religious feeling  solvents for the agnostic scientism of Europe, even while their observations remained meshed into the Victorian conflation of race and modernity.

Nicholas Wood (1795-1865) Topics as diverse as islamophobic political discourse, the Great Northern Coalfield, and the subversion of female sexuality are the subject of articles to be found in the latest edition of Codex: A Journal of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship in the Humanities . This online journal, now in its third volume , showcases some of the best undergraduate work in the Department of Culture produced by our final year students. Click here .

In July, PhD student Maria Fotiadou attended the 8th International Corpus Linguistics Conference ( CL2015 ) at Lancaster University. She gave a poster presentation entitled 'Have you developed your entrepreneurial skills? Looking back to the development of a skills-oriented Higher Education.' You can read the poster abstract here .