Academics describe their work in five minute lectures
Watch six academics in the Department of English and Humanities give five-minutes talks describing their research and why working at Birkbeck provides a unique teaching experience.
Watch six academics in the Department of English and Humanities give five-minute talks describing their research and explaining why working at Birkbeck provides a unique teaching experience.
- Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies, discusses her research into the emergence of the modern vocabulary of sex in the late nineteenth century. What do these sexual labels tell us about the society in which they were produced?
- Watch video of Heike Bauer - Joseph Brooker, Reader in Modern Literature, describes the pleasures of teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book he has written about himself, and his recent publication on the 1980s, showing how the upheavals of that period are refracted through its literature and culture.
- Watch video of Joseph Brooker - Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature, describes his recent publication The Mummy's Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy and how this led him to look at popular fiction, museums displays and tabloid newspaper stories. He also reveals how he has become an expert in transdimensional squids.
- Watch video of Roger Luckhurst - Kate McLoughlin, Lecturer in Modern Literature, discusses her work on war writing. Across war literature people claim that ‘words fail me’ – so what do writers do when they can’t find the right words? Kate’s most recent book identified six challenges to conveying the experience of war, for example how do you get across the scale of the Second World War – a conflict that killed 50 million people and lasted six years?
- Watch video of Kate McLoughlin - Aoife Monks, Senior lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, discusses the ways we might look at the body of the actor on the stage from the point of view of the audience – showing how scientific, religious and philosophical ideas of the times change how the audience thinks about the bodies of the actors they watch.
- Watch video of Aoife Monks - Adam Smyth, Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies, talks about his recent book looking at the impact of the printing press and how famous texts, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, may have been changed in this transmission. He has also published a book on autobiographical writing in the early modern period, showing the very different ways four people wrote their life-stories.
- Watch video of Adam Smyth