Pedagogical award to Christine Mackay Tircomnicu

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students – from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic

"The study examines ways in which singing figures as a strategy of action and interaction in early modern English drama."

We congratulate our colleague Christine Mackay Tircomnicu on receiving the Independent Pedagogical Award for 2020.

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"This thesis investigates the marking of evidentiality in spoken British English. Evidentiality is the linguistic expression of whether and how a speaker/writer has access to evidence for or against the truth of a proposition, and it is usually manifested in the form of sensory evidentiality [...], hearsay evidentiality [...], or inferential evidentiality [...]. The aims of this thesis are to investigate whether there are quantitative differences between women and men in how often they mark evidentiality, and to analyze the functions of evidentiality in interaction in order to formulate an explanation of any gender differences."

The thesis will be publicly defended on 18 April 2020.

Punctuation is an integral element in writing and has been so for centuries. The present volume brings together approaches in linguistics, stylistics and other fields to highlight the rich repertoire of issues involved in the study of punctuation.

A "major new contribution to Woolf and modernist studies." –  Laura Marcus, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, UK

A "stunningly insightful and truly timely new work" –  Jane Goldman, Reader in English, University of Glasgow, UK

The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordability for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African national literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about Afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today.

The news noise about the United States is sometimes deafening. The new podcast Amerikaanalys (in Swedish) should appeal to those who really want to understand what is happening, and why, in American politics and social development. We discuss topics that do not really fit into the usual news flow. Together with a US-based journalist, researchers from Halmstad University and Uppsala University talk in depth about the complex and difficult issues.

Professor Merja Kytö is awarded the Gustaf Adolf Medal for her outstanding research in English language history and for her contributions as head of the English Department 2011-2018.

Merja Kytö, professor at the Department of English, is awarded the Rettig Prize by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for her innovative work in syntax, pragmatics and corpus linguistics in early modern and modern English.

"This study examines the representation of archaeological artefacts in the fiction of a diverse body of writers, including Agatha Christie, Mary Butts, and Arthur Conan Doyle, while offering detailed analyses of the presence of archaeology in the works of Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, and Virginia Woolf."

The thesis will be publicly defended on 16 February 2019 at 10:15 in Geijersalen, English Park Campus.

The thesis will be publicly defended on 29 October 2018 at 15:15, room 7-1013, Engelska Parken.

Special issue on literary translingualism, eds. Michael Boyden and Eugenia Kelbert, Journal of World Literature, 3.2 (2018).

Professor N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University) has been appointed Distinguished Guest Professor at the Department of English, Uppsala University 2018-2020.

The aim of the thesis is to shed light on the use and development of passive voice in American English. Empirical, corpus methods are employed in order to examine the syntactic, semantic, and stylistic preferences of three English passive constructions across time and genre in American English.

The thesis will be publicly defended on 20 April 2018 at 10:15 in Geijersalen, English Park Campus.

Violence at an aesthetic remove from the spectator or reader has been a key element of narrative and visual arts since Greek antiquity. Here Robert Appelbaum explores the nature of mimesis, aggression, the affects of antagonism and victimization and the political uses of art throughout history. He examines how violence in art is formed, contextualised and used by its audiences and readers. Bringing traditional German aesthetic and social theory to bear on the modern problem of violence in art, Appelbaum engages theorists including Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Adorno and Gadamer. The book takes the reader from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art, showing how violence becomes at once a language, a motive, and an idea in the experience of art. It addresses the controversies head on, taking a nuanced view of the subject, understanding that art can damage as well as redeem. But it concludes by showing that violence (in the real world) is a necessary condition of art (in the world of mimetic play).

Publisher, year: London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.

This thesis investigates narratives of re-enchantment and disenchantment in three contemporary U.S. novels, Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

“The Imperial Short Story.” Special issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies 16/2 (2017), edited by Stephen Donovan and Leonard Driscoll.

My work is a corpus-based investigation of the use and development of temporal subordinators and clauses in Early Modern British English (EModE). The focus of the project is on the forms, structure, meanings, and history of these subordinators and clauses. My primary aim is to analyse stability and change in temporal subordinators and clauses across the EModE period; second comes the study of linguistic features, such as aspect, tense, mood and modality, ellipsis and non-finite forms, positions, coordination, and subordination of the temporal clauses. In addition, I examine the progress of these subordinators, and WHEN in particular, across text categories, text types, and the sub-periods.

Criticised for providing a simplified depiction of a post-9/11 United States, contemporary American "war on terror" fiction has been largely neglected by critical discourse. This dissertation argues that this fiction offers a vital engagement with how the War on Terror is waged, and how the fantasies and policies of the Global Homeland inform it.

The present compilation thesis investigates adjectives complemented by that- and to-clauses. More specifically, the thesis is concerned with extraposed (e.g. itis likely that she will win and it is important to win) and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I'm sure that he's alive and I'm glad to see you). The thesis s most fundamentally concerned with the study of linguistic variation. Thus the aim of the thesis is to explain why a certain construction is used in a given context.

Danuta Fjellestad, David Watson (eds). The Futures of the Present: New Directions in (American) Literature. Routledge.

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future?

This compilation thesis investigates the use of a pattern that is commonly found in academic writing, namely the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is interesting to note the difference). The main aim is to shed further light on the formal and functional characteristics of the pattern in academic writing. When relevant, the thesis also investigates functionally related constructions. The focus is on learner use, but reference corpora of published writing and non-native-speaker student writing have also been utilized for comparison. The thesis encompasses an introductory survey (a "kappa") and four articles.

This study explores the theme of nostalgia in contemporary Anglo-Arab literature from the 1990s to the present. Examining the implications of nostalgic tropes in Anglophone novels by Arab writers, the study makes the case that nostalgia is a key strategy used by these writers in their critical engagement with national historiographies and diasporic identities.

Ying Wang. The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence: A Contrastive Learner-Corpus Study of Delexical Verb + Noun Collocations. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

A Handbook in Pronunciation for Swedish Learners and Teachers by Per Otterstedt. This book provides an overview of the English sound system, and focuses on the areas of pronunciation where Swedish learners tend to have difficulties.

Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland, and France 1559-1642 by Robert Appelbaum. Oxford University Press. Terrorism is usually thought to be a modern phenomenon. But it is actually a foundational figure of the European imagination, at once a reality and a myth, and it has had an impact on political life since the beginnings of Europe itself.

Peter Waites: On the Boundaries of Watchmen: Paratextual Narratives across Media. Public defense: 13 November, 10:15, room 7-0043, English Park Campus.

Gwendolyn Haevens: Mad Pursuits: Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction. Public defense: 14 Nov. 10:15 in Geijersalen, English Park Campus.