billylinguist Creative Writing, Linguistics, English Language, English Literature

PALA in Uppsala 2026

Three colleagues from Northumbria will be talking at the 2026 PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) conference in Uppsala in August 2026.

Billy Clark and Tony Williams will be talking in the Special Interest Group workshop on Pragmatics and Literature. Billy’s talk is titled Pragmatics, reasoning and literary evaluation. Tony’s is ‘I simply do not know what I am doing’: writerly knowledge, ignorance, mystery and mythology.

Saeed Hosseini’s talk is in the main programme and is titled Viewpoint as event: bridging lyric addressand cognitive grammar in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’.

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

Billy PALA August 2026

As ever, the conference is packed with talks and events exploring a very wide range of topics in stylistics. As the PALA programme demonstrates, stylistics is a very broad and dynamic discipline, applying ideas from a very wide range of areas in exploring aspects of the production, interpretation and evaluation of a very wide variety of texts.

billylinguist Creative Writing, English Language, English Literature, Linguistics

MLA Toronto 2026

In January 2026, two Northumbria colleagues, Billy Clark and Tony Williams will take part in a special session on ‘Producing and Evaluating Style’ at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Toronto

The session will explore ideas from Billy’s project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (MRF-2024-043), which will develop an account of the pragmatic processes involved in producing, interpreting and evaluating communicative acts, as well as how all of these processes interact

You can read more about the MLA session on the MLA Humanities Commons site here:

https://producingandevaluatingstyle.mla.hcommons.org

There will also soon be more information on the project page:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/producing-and-evaluating-style/

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/billyclark-mla2026-pragmaticsandstyle.pptx

billylinguist Creative Writing, English Language and Literature, Events, history and culture

POSTPONED: The Sound of Shakespeare

We’re sorry to say that this event has had to be postponed. It will now take place on Thursday the 3rd of October. We will make more announcements nearer the time.

We are delighted to be hosting this year’s Babel lecture at Northumbria University on Thursday the 13th of June. The speaker is Ben Crystal, Ben is an actor, author, producer, an Associate Artist with the Shakespeare North Playhouse, and a consultant creative producer for Shakespeare companies around the world.

You can find out more and register here:

https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/events/2024/06/public-lecture—annual-babel-lecture-2024/

billylinguist Creative Writing, English Language, English Language and Literature, English Literature

Where will my English degree take me?

Here is a collection of interviews with graduates from undergraduate English Language and Literature programmes discussing their current roles, how their undergraduate programmes relate to them, and how their work on English programmes helped contribute to their careers.

https://sway.cloud.microsoft/EeLevTG6pfEFuhll

Continue reading “Where will my English degree take me?” →
alice2gallagher Creative Writing, Uncategorized

Don’t Worry, Be Yappy. Beth’s Butcher’s Dog Magazine Internship.

You hear of societies and extracurriculars to boost your CV before you get to university, but I could never have contemplated something like this. This opportunity, pulsing in my email inbox, to intern for The Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine…

I’ve spent 10 weeks in the doghouse, and I never want to leave. Alongside Nadia, our other lovely BD intern from Northumbria Uni, we have had our hands on everything Butcher’s Dog from the tail up.

Continue reading “Don’t Worry, Be Yappy. Beth’s Butcher’s Dog Magazine Internship.” →