About the Committee

The Landscapes Postgraduate Colloquium is run by current postgraduate (taught and research) students in the School of English at the University of Sheffield.

The current committee members are:

• Sophie Whittle

Sophie is a PhD candidate in Historical Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, funded by the Arts & Humanities University Postgraduate Research Committee. Her research focuses on the factors driving the decline of verb-second structure in the history of English, with links to the role of contact within language change. She is particularly interested in how second-language learners shape the future of languages with their innovations and/or errors.

• Eleanor Maxwell

• Jenny Kirton

Jenny is a WRoCAH funded PhD student based in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her research examines the narrative spaces depicted in a number of texts by female African-American writers, to explore the way resistive modes of being in the present-afterlife of chattel slavery are conveyed through the (re)defining potentiality of spatial-dimensional forms.

• Laura Gibbs

Laura is a WRoCAH-funded PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her research explores the role of obscured female philosophers in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, through the lens of phenomenology and gynaecology. She is also the co-chair of the Graduate Student Staff Committee for the School of English and has an upcoming review piece in the James Joyce Literary Supplement.

• Lu Shan

• Lucy Brownson

Lucy is a WRoCAH-funded collaborative PhD student at the University of Sheffield and the Chatsworth House Trust. At Chatsworth, Lucy researches the gendered labour history of archival practices from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Approaching the archives from a critical feminist perspective, Lucy's project explores the relationship between archival work, social reproduction, and other forms of feminised labour.

• Rosanne van der Voet

Rosanne is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield. Her project explores what kinds of stories can make the environmental crisis of the oceans tangible. Facts on environmental problems are not enough to mobilise action: we need new experimental writing to communicate the urgency of the Anthropocene. Her project researches these forms of writing critically as well as creatively. Originally from Amsterdam and The Hague in the Netherlands, Rosanne has a background in European Culture and Literature (BA University of Amsterdam) and Literature and Environment (MA Bath Spa University).

• Samantha Hind

Samantha is a WRoCAH-funded PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her research explores the construction of flesh as a facilitator for human and non-human animal indistinction in contemporary speculative fiction, questioning what it means to be and eat flesh in a world desperate for a sustainable alternative.

• Silvia Ghirardelli

With many thanks also to the following postgraduate students for their help on the project:

• Abigail Hadfield

• Barbara Santos

• Katie Mansfield

• Lei Huang

• Liam Ball

• Mariyah Mandu

• Rob Fellman

• Scott Moore

And finally, a thanks to: Maddy Callaghan and Fabienne Collignon for their academic expertise, and fellow postgraduate students Danny Bowman, Vera Fibisan and Ashley Bullen-Cutting for their technical advice and support!