The Ambiguous Oracle: narrative configuration in Acts

This paper outlines the way in which a plot-device, which for the sake of convenience we shall call the ‘ambiguous oracle’ in Acts 1.6–8, controls and influences the narrative, creating coherence and enabling interpretation. The paper begins by looking at the current interpretation of the verses, and argues that it is not sufficient to explain the narrative configuration at various points, before going on to suggest an alternative interpretation, in which the misinterpretation of the oracle by the Apostles leads to the fulfillment of the Divine will. This interpretation finds strong support in literature contemporary to Acts

A Norfolk gentlewoman and Lydgatian patronage: Lady Sibylle Boys and her cultural environment

A study of a medieval gentlewoman, Lady Sibylle Boys, and her cultural context, including her patronage of poetry by John Lydgate, the 'Epistle to Sibylle' and 'Treatise for Lauandres'

Putting it Right? The Labour Party's Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Putting it right? The labour party's big shift on immigration since 2010, which has been published in final form at 10.1111/1467-923X.12091. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

We All Live in a Virtual Submarine

Our seas and oceans hide a plethora of archaeological sites such as ancient shipwrecks that, over time, are being destroyed through activities such as deepwater trawling and treasure hunting. In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of 11 European institutions established the Venus (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites) consortium to make underwater sites more accessible by generating thorough, exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration

Revisiting the 18th century sublime in contemporary visual art:representations of Icelandic landscape

This thesis discusses the depiction of the landscape in art in relation to the theory of the sublime, through my own artistic practice, and through the examination of examples from the history of art. The theory of the Sublime is also analysed in the historical context of the18th century, and discussed in relation to its place, and relevance in contemporary ideas and art production. The thesis begins by examining Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and using this to explore how artists have responded to the Sublime in their paintings, examining the work of Turner and Caspar David Friedrich for example, as major exponents of the Sublime. I set out to establish whether or not the emotional qualities that the eighteenth-century idea of the Sublime uncovers, can be effectively defined by this term in contemporary painting. Alongside this, my thesis also deals with my own personal experience of the Sublime, as identified in the glacial landscapes of Iceland. The Sublime is a key influence in my artistic practice. My paintings might be seen as a direct response to feelings associated with the Sublime experienced in the glacial landscapes of Iceland, and through the process of making them I have attempted to explore and translate my sublime experience

And I half turn to go: invocatio and negation of the Public

This writing is the result of a practice-as-research project that I have undertaken as a poet, performance and sound artist. The works that I have produced dwell thematically and formally on themes of broken temporality, abject subjects, waste time and spaces, and are a response to the period coincident (London and the UK, 2010-2017) with this research. The writing is intended to create a context, or map, of where and when I made the performances and recordings, the pressures and atmospheres they responded to. During this time, broadly welfare-statist senses of “public” as polity, institutions and space have contorted under pressure from a rapacious neoliberalism and the rise of nativist and racist right-wing politics, exemplified by the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Both forces are hostile to the model of rights-bearing citizenship as the universality embodied in “stranger relationality”, which Michael Warner describes as a necessity for a sense of public (2002, p.7). This struggle feeds into debates concerning what both "public" and “citizen” mean as political concepts. I use relational aesthetics as an example of a communitarian tendency that superficially might seem to be opposed to dominant political tendencies hostile to the idea of a universal public. In this, it follows both nativist and neoliberal tendencies; in its artistic strategies it also prioritises voluntaristic “engagement” over contemplation. In both these matters, it replicates certain neoliberal models of ideal subjecthood, in which rights are replaced by privileges. This is, for me, a parallel to the tension between the Romantic lumpenprole figure of “artist” and the valorised, entrepreneurial “creative worker”. As a counterbalance, I look at a waste ground fly-tipping site in east London that I have called the Bike Cemetery. This place had at one time been occupied by an anonymous bricoleur who left an extraordinary mural comprising of collaged detritus and text on a wall supporting a motorway embankment. I take the rubbish strewn site, the mural and its creator as a constellation in themselves, a manifestation of stranger-relationality and the now abjected temporality of social democracy. In keeping with my approach to my artistic work, I use Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory (Benjamin, 1998) as a tool for looking at the ways in which ideas can present through constellations of images and detritus, making the experience of hermeneutic labour almost haptic — a wandering across and through fragments. I use materials such as “scalies” (the figures that populate the architects’ renderings printed on the hoardings put up around the sites of speculative housing developments), UK public order legislation and the history of the temperance movement. Central to this mapping which attempts to delineate an emergent form of contemporary subjectivity, is an idea of “public”, in the dual and related sense of a political collectivity that can be addressed or appealed to and the political/social artefacts of public “space” and “services” in a welfare state. This response also necessitates, for a vocal and verbal artist such as myself, a consideration of the rhetorical structures at play: much that presents as in-vocation in political discourse, the “will of the People”, for example, is actually e-vocation — allegory to the invocation’s symbol, belonging to the temporality of waste (see Viney, 2016), ruptured or halted teleology (Agamben, 2009), the time of addiction, the time of performance. I consider and have developed my work as an artist in relation to these questions: Is a performer “being public”? Is the audience an instantiation of the public? Where are “we” and what are “we” when (in) public? How can a performance address the public-as-public, which is to say, as strangers; what rhetoric, what form of address can be used? Can “public” be in-voked or e-voked by a performer? What part does my voice play as a vehicle of “in” or “e” vocation? What appropriate temporality can performance occupy or evoke at this time? How are tropes (turns, postures, images) of “national abjects” to be used without rendering them as decorative motifs for the creative class