Our online seminar series continues in 2022; details below. Do join us!
BACLS Monograph Prize Winners Showcase, *NEW DATE*: Friday 2nd December, 2pm
The first BACLS Online Seminar of 2022-23 promises to be a fascinating one: the joint winners of the 2022 BACLS Monograph Prize – Caroline Magennis (Salford) and Ian Hickey (Mary Immaculate College) – will talk about their monographs and participate in a discussion with BACLS members on issues arising from their research. Caroline Magennis’s book, Northern Irish Writing after the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures (Bloomsbury), explores the ways in which the “post”-conflict period has led writers to a renewed engagement with intimacy, the body and pleasure. It examines work by a range of exciting contemporary writers, including Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Bernie McGill and David Park. Ian Hickey’s book, Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry (Routledge), explores Seamus Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology, illuminating the many significances of ghosts as, among other things, literary influences and legacies of British colonialism.
Participants can sign up for the seminar via Eventbrite.
Please note: if you had a ticket for the October date, your ticket will now be valid for the new date, no need to sign up again.
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Editing a Prize-winning Essay Collection: a How to Guide, 24th June 2pm
The edited collection is often an underrated form and yet they are capable of shaping and defining fields, producing or coalescing a network of scholars, and (UK context) can be double-weighted entries into the REF. They can also be useful promotional tools if thought of and used judiciously. This session is a robust defence of the form, should help scholars understand what makes a good edited collection, and should also help provide questions to consider if you are invited to contribute an essay to an edited volume.
In this workshop, the 2020 BACLS Edited Collection Prize winner, Jennifer Cooke, discusses the dos and don’ts of producing an edited collection with examples from her own experience. Drawing upon the first few editorial projects she did which stemmed from a conference up to The New Feminist Literary Studies BACLS prize book, which also won a Choice Outstanding Title 2021 award. Topics covered will include: how to conceive of an editing project, getting a contract, the commissioning process, the work that editing others is, common problems encountered and how to navigate them, publication and post-publication advice. Particular focus will be given to considering how and why The New Feminist Literary Studies has done so well.
This session will be especially useful for PhD students, ECRs, and those who are yet to edit a collection of essays but are keen to either do so or contribute to an edited collection. There will be space given at the end for a Q&A.
Register for the session here.
About the speaker
Jennifer Cooke is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Theory at Loughborough University. She’s author of the BACLS Best Monograph prize winner, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and the double award-winning edited collection, The New Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Previous publications include an edited collection, Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), a special issue of Textual Practice on challenging intimacies and psychoanalysis (September 2013), and her first monograph, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (Palgrave, 2009). She’s currently writing her third monograph entitled Gender, Care, and Outsourcing in Contemporary Literature and co-editing another book, Intersectional Feminist Research Methods: Applications in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Follow her on Twitter @JenniferACooke.