Protest Memory: Black History Month for American Studies

Nearly 100 years ago, an African American intellectual decided to launch what he called “Negro History Week”. The son of former slaves, Carter G. Woodson wanted to popularize interest in black history, and transform the past from a site of pain (at slavery and lynching) to one of pride (at activism and accomplishment). He believed …

Pulling Back the Screen: Creative Student Internships

In 2009 the Creative Student Network sent its first interns to work at Fox Studios in Los Angeles. Thanks to the assistance of Nottingham alumnus Peter Rice (now Chairman of Fox Broadcasting) we had the unique chance to give three of our students real world experience of working in Hollywood and see some of the …

Widening participation in CLAS: summer schools and beyond

As the summer draws to a close and an autumnal chill hints at shorter days, a group of young people from all over the UK will be settling down to their final year of A level study with a renewed vigour and an eye on their future at a University. These young people were lucky …

Rethinking the relationship between Realism and Romanticism in the nineteenth century

Romanticism and Realism are arguably the two most prominent nineteenth-century movements in European literature and art, typically conceived as mutually exclusive and somehow reflecting the philosophical conflict of idealism and realism that runs through the history of modern European culture, or indeed is seen as universal. Nineteenth-century European literary history is seen as a shifting …

Germania remembered

A new book, Germania Remembered 1500–2009. Commemorating and Inventing a Germanic Past, co-edited by Dr Nicola McLelland (German) and Dr Christina Lee (English), and with a foreword by Tom Shippey, examines how German, English and Scandinavian scholars, writers and artists have invoked the remote history of Germany in order to bolster their ideas about what it …

Gibraltar: More than ‘Britain in the Sun’

On the back of successful viewing figures, Channel 5 has lost little time in commissioning a second series of its fly-on-the-wall documentary ‘Gibraltar: Britain in the Sun‘. Notwithstanding the personal trials and tribulations of the individuals featured in the programme, the overall picture presented of Gibraltar is overwhelmingly positive. Glossy production values, quick edits, overlapping …

The Mysterious Constance Farrington

When people talk about translations, they usually do one of two things: either, they treat the translation as if it wasn’t a translation, talking about it as if it were a carbon copy of the original, or else they criticise the translation, bemoaning what is ‘lost’. This has certainly been the case for Constance Farrington’s …

Jazz in France

In a poem written in the 1930s, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a black student from French West Africa, soon to be recognised as a founding father of the négritude movement, recounts strolling down the Rue Fontaine in Paris, past the open door of the Cabane cubaine, an early jazz club. As the sounds of jazz spill …

More Windows on Russia and Eastern Europe

In our latest sneak peek of the forthcoming book ‘Windows on Russia and Eastern Europe’, written by Nottingham alumni, we hear from Daniel Vowles, who worked in the Soviet Union at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Doing business was chaotic to say the least…  My next “dream” posting was to Kaliningrad. I have to admit …

German literature rediscovers Germany’s neglected colonial history

In the late 1990s, a surge of historical novels about German colonialism in Africa and its previously neglected legacies hit the German literary scene. Accelerated by the centenary in 2004 of Germany’s colonial war in South-West Africa and the genocide of the Herero, this development has continued to the present, making colonialism an established theme …