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The third seminar in the language research series will be taking place on Monday 29 th February in Forster 302 at 5.00pm . The talk will be given by a new member of TESOL staff Dr Michael Hepworth. The topic of his talk is 'Argumentation and citizenship in the adult TESOL classroom'. All welcome!

Thom Yorke (source: Wikipedia) Blake scholar Dr David Fallon has appeared on the BBC World Service's Newshour to discuss the lyrics of Radiohead's 'Airbag'. Oxfam will be auctioning a donated copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience which contains the first draft of Thom Yorke's lyric. The singer's annotations of various poems can also be seen in the volume. In his radio interview, David explores the links between 'A Cradle Song' and 'Airbag', as well as discussing Blake's influence on rock music more generally. You can hear David here (the interview starts at 18' 10"). 

Dr Geoff Nash 's article 'Postmodernism' is an entry in Gale's newly published Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (ed. Richard C. Martin, Gale 2016) .  It outlines how Islam was viewed by a postmodern philosopher such as Foucault, what Muslim intellectuals like Ziauddin Sardar, Salman Sayyid and Anouar Majid have written about postmodernism, and how Muslim writers and film-makers have responded creatively to the postmodern period. 

William Gifford Palgrave, 1868 © National Portrait Gallery, London The next talk in this semester's series of English research seminars will be given by Dr Geoff Nash . Drawing on the National Portrait Gallery’s current display , Geoff will consider the extraordinary life of the leading British explorer and scholar of the Middle East, William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888), assessing his adoption of disguise, and his reputation as a 'brilliant failure'. After serving for a time in the Indian army, Palgrave converted to Roman Catholicism and worked as a missionary in southern India until 1853. He began his long engagement with the Arab world in 1855 as a missionary in Syria, where he witnessed the persecution of Syrian Christians. Palgrave’s most notable achievement lay in exploring Arabia, which had for years been closed to Europeans. In 1862 and 1863 he became the first Westerner to cross Arabia by a diagonal route, from north-west to south-east, travelling in disguise and a

Dr Geoff Nash has contributed an essay to a new critical edition of Ameen Rihani's 1911 novel The Book of Khalid (2016, Syracus University Press, edited with an Introduction by Todd Fine) . Geoff discusses the novel in relation to Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran and the migrant scene in New York and Boston in the first decades of the twentieth century, foregrounding the contemporary vogue for Arab/Oriental writers and discussing in particular their championing by influential American women.

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1563 The second talk in the new series of Languages Research Seminars will be given by Dr Susan Mandala on the topic of 'ESL and EFL voices in English literature’. It takes place on Monday 8 th February at 6.00pm in FR 302 (Forster building , City Campus). All welcome!