Alice Burns
Alice is an AHRC-funded researcher in the department of English at the University of Liverpool, looking at the relationship between land and literature. Her research focuses on the lesser-known writings of Anne Lister and Beatrix Heelis to understand their approaches to land management, examining the tension between investments in rural industry, balanced with concerns for the environment and the question of conservationism.
Working collaboratively with the West Yorkshire Archive Service and the National Trust to undertake archival research, she also works part-time in publishing at Liverpool University Press, specialising in marketing for the Literature, Culture and Religious Studies Journals.
Nathan Bramald
Nathan is a LADA-funded researcher in the department of English at the University of Liverpool, currently researching the representation of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic life within English Literature and models of scientific communication. His work covers palaeofiction from its inception right up until the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the ways in which representations of dinosaurs changed in fiction following on from the scientific revolution of the dinosaur renaissance (which began in the 1960s).
He argues that general perceptions of Anthropocentric concerns, particularly climate change, are in part affected by the sensationalised image of extinct life in fiction, which hinders the ability of readers to properly conceptualise geological deep time and therefore the unstable place of humanity in Earth's natural history.
Kahrie Carter
Kahrie's research focuses on how cancer is portrayed as an individuated disease within literature from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. In 2020, she was awarded both the Joseph Rotblat Scholarship for her PhD studies and the Kenneth Allott Award for best Master’s nineteenth-century dissertation at her university. She has been the student chair of the Staff-Student Liaison Committee for the English Department and the Senate Representative for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool.
Sietse Hagen
Sietse is a LADA-funded Postgraduate Researcher at the English Department of the University of Liverpool. Originally from the Netherlands, he formed his research interests during his Bachelor's and research master's degrees at the University of Groningen and a one-year Harting scholarship at Newcastle University.
His current research is on the use of horror in representations of trauma in Indian children's literature. His aim is for children's literature scholarship to seriously consider the effects of horrors of reality on children and seek positive, decolonising representations of these traumatic realities. His wider research reaches into other (post)colonial and Indigenous cultures and communities, disability studies, and ecocriticism. His PhD will form the basis of his further research on trauma and horror in children's literature.
Faye Lynch
Faye is a first year PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool, where she is developing her thesis on depictions of the ‘fembot’ in post-1930 Anglosphere Science Fiction, considering how these depictions illuminate our changing cultural perceptions of technology, gender, and sexuality.
She is one of the co-organisers and social media manager of the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF) Conference at the University of Liverpool. Faye’s other research interests include contemporary American fiction, the Cold War in literature and visual culture, and twentieth century poetry.
Lola de la Mata
Situated in the Music department and supported by the LADA scholarship, Lola’s research question hovers around…Hearing with Difference: Experimental Sonic and Live Art Expressions of Aural Diversity through the Tinnitus Archive. As a sound artist and composer who experiences chronic tinnitus, she is developing new compositions, sound installations, and live performances in collaboration with biophysicists, musicians, glass blowers and percussion makers supported by workshops with musicians and non-musicians who experience chronic tinnitus.
Her debut album Oceans on Azimuth was released May 2024 (The Quietus, New Scientist, BBC Radio 6, Electronic sound Magazine, and others) for which she won a Sound of the Year Award, and an Oram Award, which seeks to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology. She has received commissions from the Riot Ensemble, Zubin Kanga, Nonclassical, Lisson Gallery, Spitalfields Music Festival, Selina Thompson Theatre Company, and crafted soundtracks for experimental film, documentary and the award winning feature film STOPMOTION by Robert Morgan.
Eleanor McAdam
Eleanor is a Creative Writing Postgraduate Researcher in the department of English at the University of Liverpool. Their research interests concern science fiction literature, with a specific focus on Artificial Intelligence, the fictionalisation of coding languages and Inner Speech in robotics, and philosophies on consciousness and the soul. Eleanor’s creative work can be seen in both University of Manchester and University of Liverpool Anthologies.
Richie Snowden-Leak
Richie's AHRC-funded PhD specifically concentrates on the benefits that New Weird fiction has on mental health, both in the creation of this fiction and the reading thereof in groups, especially in online forums. This PhD leans on ecocriticisms of anthropocentric, logocentric thinking; the enmonstering hierarchies of white hegemony in the Othering of differing races and sexes; and the nightmarish horrors of capitalism that commodifies and ‘contentifies’ in this era of what he calls ‘Always-Late Capitalism’.
He has been part of several research teams dedicated to the importance of medical humanities, such as SHARED and LivCare, which collect data from across Liverpool and the international community on how charities and arts-and-health-based practices have come to help the ailing mental health of those in marginalised communities.
David Tierney
David is pursuing a creative writing PhD at the University of Liverpool, looking at non-human animal communication in science fiction literature with a focus on farm animals. His research involves writing a novel set in a near-future Ireland on a farm animal sanctuary and is told from the perspective of humans, non-human animals, and robot animals, each written in different styles with varying fragmentation to portray the near inaccessibility of non-human animal minds.
David's critical work explores this inaccessibility along with depictions of the gestures of non-human animals and the place of farm animals in other science fiction texts. Alongside his PhD, he is an organiser for CRSF, a PGR/ECR rep with ASLE-UKI, and a host/editor for The Bibliography, the English Department’s podcast.
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