Spring 2012: NRG News

Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas have been awarded a grant from the AHRC under the Digital Transformations Call. Details of the project can be found at www.researchingreadersonline.com. The project runs from February to July and has already attracted considerable interest from academics, professionals working with readers, and readers themselves.  Julia and Bronwen have also been successful in gaining a contract with Continuum to publish a volume based on papers delivered at the Keeping it Real and Non-human Narratives symposia. Provisionally entitled Real Lives, Celebrity Stories: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Media, the volume is expected to be out towards the end of next year. It includes chapters by several members of NRG as well as other leading academics in the fields of narrative theory, media and cultural studies.

Rosie Cullen has organized the 2nd Southern Script Festival, running March 17-18th at BU. The programme includes some high profile scriptwriters and provides an opportunity for budding writers to learn about pitching, networking and developing ideas for film, tv, new media, radio and theatre.

Hywel Dix gave a paper entitled ‘Cymbeline and the Display of Empire’ at the conference ‘Shakespeare and Tyranny’ at the University of Murcia in January as part of his ongoing project on Reading, Writing and Republicanism. He has a paper entitled ‘Mythopoetics for a new millennium: decoding satire in Sebastian Faulks, Amanda Craig and Jim Crace’ due to be published in the inaugural issue of C21 Literature: journal of twenty-first century writings; and another entitled ‘From Markets to Metafiction: Satires of the literary marketplace at the dawn of two new centuries’ in the journal Textes et Contextes.

Along with colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan and Dundee Universities, Julia Round is organizing the Third International Comics Conference to be held at BU in June. More details can be found atwww.comics.bujournalism.info. Julia’s recent publications include ‘Fantastic alterities and The Sandman’ in Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres, ed. Jake Jakaitis and James F. Wurtz (Jefferson, CA: McFarland), ‘Gothic and the Graphic Novel’ in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London: Blackwells, 2012), ‘Naturalising the fantastic: comics archetypes’ in Investigating Heroes: Essays on Truth, Justice and Quality TV, ed. David Simmons (Jefferson, CA: McFarland, 2012), and ‘Out of House and Holmes’ in Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy, ed. Josef Steiff. Part of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, series ed. George A. Reisch (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 2011),  Julia presented a paper at Winchester University’s ‘Zombosium’ last October and has given/is about to give guest lectures at Central St Martins (Nov 2011) and the University of Amsterdam (April 2012).

Bronwen Thomas has had a paper on Talking About Television on Twitter accepted for the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference in July, 2012. Her monograph on Fictional Dialogue is about to be published by the University of Nebraska Press (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Fictional-Dialogue,674950.aspx) and she has recently completed a chapter on Twitterfiction for a collection of essays called Analysing Digital Fiction edited by Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin (Routledge 2013), and an article on Stieg Larsson to be published in a special issue of Language and Literature on contemporary crime fiction.

Watch this space for more exciting news soon of visiting speakers.

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