Kennedy Hall is home to the School of English. Located on The Scores, Kennedy Hall has a range of rooms used for teaching and selected events including the Garden Room and the Watson Room.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promotes the distribution of rights and freedoms ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’ (Article 2). Throughout the 1950s, UNESCO published a series of statements and pamphlets about racial equality, with…
In August 2024 the third iteration of the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy was launched. It was based on 5 years research and evaluation of the operation of the New Scots Strategy since 2014. The new handbook, Global Learnings from the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy explores what it means to undertake research with refugees…
Please join this year’s Creative Writing MFA students for a celebratory reading from their work. The reading will take place from 6.30-8.00pm in the Lawson Room, Kennedy Hall, and is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided. For further information please contact: Oli Hazzard [email protected] Anne Boyer [email protected]
This talk addresses a compelling paradox in Anne Finch’s country house poetry. Known for her defense of women’s education and artistic agency, Finch approaches this genre in a way that seemingly amounts to a celebration of patriarchy. Dissonance thus arises between her proto-feminism and her deference to male supremacy, a disposition informed in turn by…
In the ‘Argument’ to The Alchemist, Ben Jonson spells out the name of his play in the form of a twelve-line acrostic. Plotted across the vertical axis, the acrostic maps a totality; the microcosmic design of the play is articulated via each letter of its subject. John Donne and John Milton also used acrostics, including…
Concordia discors as a stylistic habit and ordering principle does not effectively end with the poetry of Alexander Pope, as mid-twentieth century philologists contended, but carries through the Romantic era and into the twentieth century. This essay examines concordia discors in two poets who respond to Pope’s Essay on Man: Voltaire, who undoes the syntactical…
As large language models become fully integrated into everyday digital tools for authorship and research, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to issue blanket prohibitions against ever using generative AI in university coursework and peer-reviewed scholarship. This talk addresses how to formulate potential learning outcomes for students, how to design effective professional training for instructors in the…
Melville has been widely celebrated in recent scholarship as a major female voice in early modern Scottish society. A Fife magnate’s daughter who was married to a Church of Scotland minister at Culross, she is now best known as the author of Ane godlie Dreame compylit in Scottish Meter (Edinburgh, 1603). This poem transmutes the…
School of English Research Seminar featuring Dr Christine Okoth (Kings College London). While the event of revolution has produced both an extensive theoretical vocabulary and a literary and cultural archive for postcolonial studies, the political and economic organization of the postcolonial state has proven a more vexed object of analysis. The historical period following formal…
This Graduate Theory Reading Group seminar presents Dr Syrithe Pugh of the University of Aberdeen and a tal entitled, ‘Chasing Virgil’s Gnat’. The Culex is a quirky, entertaining and sophisticated poem, but also an elusive one. Its transmission and reception over the course of two thousand years has shaped and reshaped it, altering both the…