Reading the Riots

I designed this handout to cover 2- 3 hours of learning time. It involves a listening text which is part of a report of a review carried out by the LSE and the Guardian on the recent riots in the summer of 2011. The listening text comprises an introduction as to why the report was carried out (in the absence of any governmental reflection and critique) and then a series of short narratives from people who took part in the disturbances. I have also uploaded a description of my teaching approach according to the handou

Fortran II to Fortran IV translator UOM SFT for the IBM 7090/7094

Program in Snobol for translation of Fortran II INTO Fortran IV for IBM 7090/709

Orality and agency : Reading an Irish autobiography from the Great Blasket Island

In the discussion that follows, I advance my case for considering the Blasket autobiographies as collaboratively produced texts, with particular emphasis on examining the manner in which they were produced. This examination raises several critical questions that will be addressed in turn. How can we best understand the various collaborators' roles in producing the text, particularly that of the subject-author, or native, of the text? It is of particular importance not to dismiss the native's agency in one's reading. In a consideration of how a particular type of critical reading has tended to suppress or misread the native's agency, I take into account how this error is buttressed by a misunderstanding of the theoretical construct of orality. When the individual's role in orality is suppressed in favor of a view that sees primary oral cultures as producing texts independent of individual authorship or agency, a further misreading of printed texts is encouraged. In the final segment of my discussion, I address how a reader might distinguish between two fundamentally different readings of the same text: the native as a representative type and the native as author./

The Volcano and the Vampire: The Case for a Volcanic Gothic

The original typescript of Bram Stoker’s Dracula features a sensational (and now largely forgotten) volcanic ending, with an eruption swallowing up Castle Dracula after the Count’s demise. Dracula is far from the only nineteenth-century vampire with links to volcanism. I want to set Stoker’s volcanic ending in a longer cultural tradition of vampiric-volcanic connection that stretches back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the period of the earliest fictional vampires, and a heightened cultural fascination with volcanoes stimulated by increased volcanic activity on Etna and Vesuvius and the excavations at Pompeii. This article charts the connections between the vampire and volcano demonstrates what may have seemed obvious to a nineteenth-century reader but has become obfuscated today: that as Gothic symbols these two are cultural cousins who share much of the same symbolic coding and signifying power. The volcano shares many of the features by which the vampire has been theorised as a Gothic menace. Understanding how the Gothic has been shaped by late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century fascination with volcanos affords us a new perspective on some of its key authors, tropes, and thematic concerns, from the horrors of history haunting the present, to theological and psychological unease, or the uncannily undead body as a site of otherness. Appreciating the prevalence of what I term a ‘Volcanic Gothic’ in nineteenth-century culture also enables us to recognise how legacies of such a mode might continue to rumble unnoticed below the surface of later Gothic narratives

Final report - FAVOR project, SOAS

This brief report summarises the experiences and outcomes of the tutors from the School of Oriental and African Studies, who took part in the FAVOR project. This project was funded by JISC to explore open practice with part-time language tutors