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Culture Research Seminar Series  Faculty of Education and Society The School of Culture is pleased to announce the new season of research seminars. All sessions except otherwise stated will be in Reg Vardy 111 10th February 12 noon, Priestman 115 : Iain Rowan (Sunderland University) New approaches to storytelling in the digital age 24th February 4pm: Dr. Kevin Yuill (Sunderland University) Rebels against the infinite: Attitudes to suicide in the fin-de-siecle USA 24th March 5-7pm, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens : Dr. Mary Talbot (author of The Red Virgin ) and Dr. Laura O’Brien (Northumbria University) Revolutionary women: Imagining Louise Michel 7th April 4pm : Dr. Delphine Doucet (Sunderland University) Priestcraft, civil religion and toleration in the early modern period 12th May 4pm: Dr. James Koranyi (Durham University) Fascist Divisions: a Romanian German "historians' dispute" at the end of the Cold War 9th June 4pm : Dr. David Fallon (Sunderland Univ...

Dr David Fallon 's new book on William Blake has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis provides compelling new readings of Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

Several members of the School of Culture will be taking part in the Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival this autumn. Click on the links below to find out who will be doing what and where. The festival starts on September 30th (the full schedule is here ). Spectral Visions book launch Against the Grayne: Learning about your Reiver ancestry Witchcraft and wizardry in Wearside Northern Gothic: Jane Harvey's The Castle at Tynemouth (1806) Eternity in an hour: William Blake and popular music Gothic Wearside World books to read before you die Apples and Snakes performance poetry Flash Fiction in a flash: how to write it and how to get it published Reading philosophy to lose weight The terrorist novel from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent to Hamid Mohsen's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Of Peter and Jemima: An introduction to the extraordinary life of Beatrix Potter 'Not quite a Geordie': The ethnonyms of North East England Wizards, goblins and forbidden l...

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"). 

The North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies is holding an event on Friday 27th November (Priestman 215, 3-5pm) . There will be two papers: Catherine Ellis (Durham), ‘Sensual Suppers: Eating and Drinking in the Parisian Brothel’; and David Fallon (Sunderland), ‘Gillrayand Faulderversus the Lascivious Earl: A Bookseller in the Tides of Culture’. All are welcome and the talks will be followed by free drinks! The forum was founded in 2004. It is a collaboration between Durham University, Newcastle University, Northumbria University and Sunderland. The forum hosts a number of seminars each year in the North East, and aims to foster discussion and research into all aspects of British culture of the long-eighteenth century and Romantic period.

Blake's Albion An essay by Dr David Fallon has been published in Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions , a Cambridge University Press collection edited by A.D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne. In 'Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution', David shows the significance in Blake's writing of the Enlightenment discourse of national manners and the emerging notions of nationalism and the militarised nation-state that arose during the British wars with revolutionary France. Blake's poetry reveals a complex relationship to nationalism as he attempts to articulate a form of distinctly British patriotism without endorsing the 'official' martial British nationalism of the time. He argues that Blake, like a number of radical contemporaries, regarded the violence of the French Revolution and the aggressive response of Britain arising from deeply engrained national cultures.

Dr David Fallon recently gave a paper at Romantic Imprints - the British Association of Romantic Studies conference in Cardiff (July 16th-19th). 'Gillray, the Phallic Earl, and the Public Meanings of a 1790s Imprint' discussed James Gillray's caricature  Sandwich-Carrots!­—dainty Sandwich-Carrots (3rd December 1796), which lampooned John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. The paper argues that the presence of Robert Faulder's bookshop in the background of the caricature is actually central to the caricature's message.