Events

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

  • “Make Migration Great Again: Discourse Ethnography on the Double-bind for Migrant Teachers in Germany”

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr Yalız Akbaba - Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (https://www.schulpaedagogik.uni-mainz.de/yalz-akbaba-m-a/) Abstract German discourses about migrants’ children in schools usually insinuate educational problems, social deviances and cultural incommensurability. Interestingly, this stigma becomes a capital when talking about teachers with the same ethnic minority background that is usually linked with problems: teachers whose descendants had immigrated to […]

  • “Charles Dickens, Transformist: Popular Science and the Victorian Novel.”

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Prof. Ian Duncan - The University of California, Berkeley (https://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/21) Abstract The enormous cultural prestige of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory has eclipsed earlier and alternative versions of nineteenth-century evolutionary science, both (until recently) among historians of science and among literary scholars. As a result, critical discussions of Dickens’s fiction in relation to Victorian natural science […]

  • What’s the Matter? Thinking with Shakespeare’s Stuff

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Professor Helen Smith - University of York (https://www.york.ac.uk/english/our-staff/helen-smith/) Abstract 'What's the matter?', Polonius asks Hamlet. But what exactly does he mean? This paper gets to grips with early modern understandings of matter as, variously, the stuff of the world, the subject of thought and language, the central principle of a legal case, the excremental substances […]

  • “Below the Line: The Construction of a ‘Permanent Underclass’ in YouTube Comments”

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    John Scott Daly - The University of Hong Kong Abstract Using a critical discourse studies approach, here I analyse YouTube comments attached to an episode of Benefits Street, a Channel 4 documentary series about welfare recipients. Having qualitatively analysed over 3,000 comments, I argue that commenters use vari-directional double-voicing and enregistered emblems to co-construct a […]

  • “Her Shadow: Killing Off the Female Double in Realist and Gothic Fiction”

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Natalie Mo - The University of Hong Kong Abstract The doppelganger is a recurring character across literary history. Within nineteenth-century British literature, it is most commonly associated with gothic fiction in which it functions as an externalization of the protagonist’s transgressive desires. This paper argues that this character type is common not only in gothic […]

  • “Replotting the Harlot’s Progress: Motherhood and Moral Agency in Gaskell’s Ruth”

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Anneliese Ng - The University of Hong Kong Abstract This talk examines how Elizabeth Gaskell offers an alternative plot for the fallen woman in her 1853 novel Ruth. Gaskell reworks the dominant plot of the fallen woman genre by revoking what Amanda Anderson calls “the downward-path principle.” It dictates that once a woman has sex outside […]