Category Archives: Research initiation 2022-2023

Postgraduate student interviews: Lauren McShane (PhD)

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

What has your academic trajectory been so far?

I really enjoyed languages at school. I studied Spanish at GCSE and took French just before GCSE, and I decided to continue them. I did an undergraduate degree in French and Spanish, and decided that I hadn’t had enough of French. I really wanted to keep going so I decided to continue on to MRes because I wanted to work in a research-led, more heavily dissertation-weighted kind of course, and I didn’t think the taught programs, like the MAs, were as good a fit. I did an MRes on medical humanities and French culture, even though I had never studied medical humanities before. The MRes is a good space to discover something completely new. I really wanted to keep this going, so I decided to apply for a PhD (which you absolutely do not have to do if you get an MRes!). The MRes sets you up well for it; you get the chance to explore other areas of the School and get a chance to experiment with some more independent work.

What are you currently working on, and why did you choose the topic?

I’m still within the medical humanities, I really enjoy it. While I was doing my MRes, I got really interested in broader networks of people. So, for example, I was looking at one person suffering with alcoholism, but I became interested in what the experience for other people around them might be like and what their lived experience of care is like. I decided to put together a PhD project with my supervisor on narratives of family alcoholism. I’m looking at people who have grown up with an alcoholic mum or dad and how they write about their lived experience and have come to understand health care and their parent’s experience. For me, it really grew out of my MRes project. I will say that that the project did change post-proposal, so there’s nothing wrong with you or the project if it has to change. The research evolves and grows with you.

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Postgraduate Research in Progress Showcase, Friday 24 March 2023 – Seminar Write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

On 24 March 2023, the Queen’s University Belfast Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group hosted the Postgraduate Research in Progress session as part of their ongoing seminar series. The seminar was chaired by PhD candidate Ciara Gorman, with fellow PhD researchers Sijie Mou (Linguistics), Rebecca Gosling (French), and Laura Kennedy (French) presenting their work. The main theme of the seminar was addressing the challenges that arise when trying to complete a piece of work as substantial as a doctoral thesis.

Laura, Rebecca, and Sijie at one of their preparatory meetings for the seminar

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The Metropole, the Diaspora, their Books, their Circuits: Reading English Drama in Spain 1640-1808, Friday 10 March 2023 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

On Friday 10^th March 2023, Dr John Stone (Serra Hunter Fellow in English Literature, Universitat de Barcelona) delivered a seminar about his latest research on diasporic populations in Spain between 1640 and 1808 and their libraries, particularly English language dramas and poetry.

Dr Stone opened the seminar by introducing us to the diasporic populations he would be focusing on in the paper. A diaspora refers to a network of ethnically and linguistically related peoples who are often geographically separated from one another. Dr Stone referred primarily to the communities of British and Irish immigrants, mainly Catholics, who were forced from the newly Protestant Great Britain following the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and moved to Spain. They became “islands of English culture”, in Dr Stone’s words. Books and other literary works in their native tongue acted as tools to preserve and further their cultural heritage in a foreign nation.

These communities were incredibly close-knit, and the solidarity between their members was evidenced in the work of the Royal Scots College, a seminary founded in Madrid in 1627. As Dr Stone explained, ordinary families could not import books into Spain. The Scots College, however, had a licence to import almost any text they wanted, and so would take requests from British and Irish diasporic communities to provide them with this connection to their natal land.

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Monsters and Killjoys: Feminist Activism in Galician Audiovisual Culture, Friday 4 November 2022 – Seminar Write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

On Friday 4^th November 2022, Dr Catherine Barbour (Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spanish Peninsular Studies, Trinity College Dublin) delivered a seminar on the Galician webseries Monstras, directed by Eire García Cid, and how its feminist perspective compares with work more typical of what is known as Galician noir.

At the beginning of her presentation, Dr Barbour introduced the concept of Galician noir, a media genre sharing the key characteristics of Scandi noir with a strong sense of culture specific to the Galician community. There is frequently an undercurrent of rebellion, with anti-state sentiments mirroring the feelings of the region towards the Spanish state. Programmes and novels are almost exclusively in the Galician language – Monstras takes this a step further by having English subtitles rather than Spanish.

Still from *Monstras.*
Image credit: Corentena Producións 2020

Dr Barbour then turned more specifically to Monstras itself, which was made available exclusively on YouTube from July 2020, the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows a group of women hiding out in their friend’s apartment after a violent act of revenge upon the man who sexually assaulted one of their friends. The production itself exudes anti-institutionalism; it was completely crowd-funded, with an exclusively female team.

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