BLOG Posts & PODCASTS

READ: Research in English At Durham, October 2020

If I told you that a man played his cello in the middle of a besieged city during a terrible war, you might think I was making it up. Yet that is exactly what Vedran Smailović did during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992...

Late Summer Lectures, Durham, 2019

What happens when we read about music in their fiction? Can novels also help us to imagine the story of a tune? Does it change our interpretation of the novel if we already know the song being referred to and ‘hear’ it in our mind as we read? These are difficult and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions, but Katie Harling-Lee invites you to try in this composition of words and music...

The Professor Is In: The Blog, September 2019

To begin: Turn your PhD into a job. Yes, academic study can be a passion, but it is also job preparation, packed full with training opportunities. This idea can sometimes be frowned upon in the ivory tower of academia, but like it or not, universities are in crisis — and there is no time like the present for starting your job preparations, both for academic and nonacademic routes...

The Professor Is In: The Blog, September 2019

In just an hour and a half, Dr Karen Kelsky presented a room full of budding PhD students with enough advice to warrant over 2,000 words worth of notes. This post is the boiled down version, highlighting the points that I wish all PhD students could be taught during their studies...

READ: Research in English At Durham, 2019

In this podcast, we chatted with Arya and Katie about their own research, the field of modern and contemporary literary studies today, and the group they have recently formed, ModCon: Modern and Contemporary Literature Network...

READ: Research in English At Durham, November 2018

You have probably heard of the Old Norse gods Odin, Loki, and Thor, albeit often in ‘Hollywood-ized’ versions. But have you heard of Gudrun, daughter of Gjuki, wife of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, and badass woman of the seven-hundred-year-old Poetic Edda? Be introduced to her by Katie Harling-Lee...