Sex, violence and Wuthering Heights

SEXUAL politics, migration and violence against women are all topics that will be explored at the first annual Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Research research student symposium, next week.

The symposium will take place on 10 May, and will feature posters and presentations from research students working in English, History, Sociology, Philosophy, Languages and Information and Communication.

The papers to be presented are:

• Queer Projection and the Articulation of Dissident Desire in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights - Caroline Baylis-Green (Dept. of English)

• Challenging historiography and disrupting history: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) and historiographic metafiction - Aaron Jackson (Dept. of English)

• ‘Paul our contemporary’: Alain Badiou, communism and the politics of resurrection - Thomas Rudman (Dept. of English)

• Disability and Comedy: a Bakhtinian Dialogue - Ian Shaw (Dept. of English)

• A Fantasy of Submission: Rousseau, Godwin and Sexual Politics at the End of the 18th Century - Richard Gough Thomas (Dept. of English)

• Transformation, Adaptation and Identity Shifts: How the Romanian migrants in the UK negotiate changes - Oana Romocea (Dept. of History)

• ‘Chatting Sri Lanka’. The Telephone and the Public Sphere in colonial Times - Justin Siefert (Dept. of History)

• Academic Attitudes to New Media: A Methodological Exploration - Kathleen Menzies (Dept. of Information & Communications)

• Perceptions of and Attitudes towards Violence against Libyan Women - Suaad Elabani (Dept. of Sociology)

• Corpus deconstruction: a cross-disciplinary perspective on a corpus of Buddhist English - Jessica Frye & John Rowe (Dept. of Languages & English)

Leda Channer, Student Committee Member for the symposium, said: “As a first year PhD candidate, I became involved with the First Annual IHSSR Research Student Symposium because I wanted the valuable experience of both presenting at and being involved in the organising of a conference.

“I am also very interested to find out what other candidates from different disciplines are researching and how it’s going for them. I see the Annual IHSSR Research Student Symposium as an excellent opportunity to practice presenting and try out ideas in a safe space as well as a chance to find out first-hand about the diverse range of postgraduate research happening in the IHSSR.”