Words Matter Podcasts

Rachel Bentley and Madz Warley return for the a new instalment of "Book'd & Busy: A Lit Life On Campus", the official podcast of the English Literature and Creative Writing Degrees at York St John University!

This time Madz and Rachel are joined by three third year English Literature students: Gaby Wade, Grace Tanner and Lauren Wilson.

The gang discuss their dissertation projects, which cover such topics as Science Fiction and the Anthropocene, literary representations of automata, automation and artificial intelligence, and the treatment of disease and contagion on modern Horror.

Gaby, Grace and Lauren also share one book that made them, which include:

Ted Chiang's Arrival

Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind

Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games

Other books discussed in this episode include:

Stephen King's Cell

Mary Shelley's The Last Man

Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Ray Bradbury's The Veldt

Issac Assimov's I, Robot

Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's The Future Eve

Rachel Bentley and Madz Warley return for the a new instalment of "Book'd & Busy: A Lit Life On Campus", the official podcast of the English Literature and Creative Writing Degrees at York St John University!

This time Madz and Rachel are joined by Dr Fraser Mann, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at York St John University. Jo is also Co-Director of the Music, Memory and Narrative Research Group and editor of the recently published collection Venue Stories (Equinox 2024) .

Fraser discusses the process by which he came to collaborate on Venue Stories, before sharing three of the books that made him:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Rat Girl (formerly Paradoxical Undressing) by Kirsten Hersh

Rachel Bentley and Madz Warley return for the second instalment of "Book'd & Busy: A Lit Life On Campus", the official podcast of the English Literature and Creative Writing Degrees at York St John University!

This time Madz and Rachel are joined by Dr Jo Waugh, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at York St John University. Jo is also Co-Director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire, Co-Host of the ongoing monthly podcast Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire and author of the recently published monograph Charlotte Brontë and Contagion: Myths, Memes, and the Politics of Infection (Palgrave 2024).

Jo discusses the process by which she wrote her own book, before sharing three of the books that made her:

The Complete Adventures of Polly and the Stupid Woolf by Catherine Stoor

Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Rachel Bentley and Madz Warley return for the second instalment of "Book'd & Busy: A Lit Life On Campus", the official podcast of the English Literature and Creative Writing Degrees at York St John University!

In this episode, Rachel and Madz are again joined by the Course Lead for English Literature at York St John University, Dr Adam James Smith, to share the books that made them.

Which books were the gateway drug leading to Rachel, Madz and Adam living their best LIT lives?

In the second half of the episode, Rachel and Madz - both in the third year of their respective Creative Writing and English Literature degrees - share plans for the dissertation projects they're about to begin, and quiz Adam on what his own dissertation was about when he was a student.

In this episode, we have been reading:

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Guitar Girl by Sarra Manning

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkin Reid

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox

Gig by Simon Armitage

Welcome to "Book'd & Busy: A Lit Life On Campus", the official podcast of the English Literature and Creative Writing Degrees at York St John University!

Hosted by Creative Writing student Rachel Bentley (host of the "Unspoken Stories" podcast) and English Literature student Madz Warley (co-host of "Dogeared: A Bookish Podcast" and Chair of the YSJ Dead Poets Society), this podcast is your one-stop-shop for all the bookish chat; exploring the books that made us and the books we are reading now.

In this first episode, published during York St John University Welcome Week 2024, Rachel and Madz talk to the Course Lead for English Literature, Adam J Smith, about how to make the most of the first few weeks at University studying Literature and/or Creative Writing.

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavor of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

In our final installment, Dr Adam James Smith talks to Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh, Professor of Global Literature, about her research interests in Caribbean Food Studies and in contemporary postcolonial writing and cultures, especially Caribbean, Black British and women's writing.

Sarah's latest research centres on the interplay between food and culture in Caribbean and diasporic contexts, with particular interests in cookery writing and questions of 'authenticity', culinary versions of 'nation', oral history and culinary transmission and food hierarchies and social order in early accounts of and in the Caribbean.

Drawing on his research exploring the role played by print in mediating the relationship between citizens and the state throughout the long eighteenth century, Dr. Adam James Smith (Associate Professor, English Literature) considers the "uses" of literature. Adam introduces a series of case-studies in which literature was "used" for the purposes of propaganda, protest and satire during the eighteenth century, before examining the ways in which this same literature was used (and perhaps also abused) by readers and critics.

Music: "knowing Nothing" by Mid Air Machine (Creative Commons License)

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavour of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our fifth interview is with Dr Adam J Smith, Associate Professor in English Literature at York St John University. Adam is interested in the function of cheap print in the eighteenth century, with a particular interest in propaganda, protest and satire.

Conducting the interview is last time's guest, Jo Waugh.

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University.

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

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This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavour of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our fifth interview is with Dr Jo Waugh, Senior Lecture in English Literature at York St John University. Jo's is interested in Victorian contagions and literary representations of those contagions, especially with reference to the Brontës.

Conducting the interview is last time's guest, Dr Alex Beaumont.

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University.

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavor of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our fourth interview is with Dr Alex Beaumont, Senior Lecture in English Literature and Politics at York St John University. Alex's work is is organized around the intersection of politics and spatiality primarily in British cultural production of the period 1945-present. Conducting the interview is last time's guest, Dr Fraser Mann. 

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University.

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavour of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our third episode is a conversation with Dr Fraser Mann, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at York St John University. Fraser works on mid-twentieth century American fiction and its relationship with salient socio-cultural phenomena of the same period. His PhD, which he undertook at YSJU, explored the literary representation of masculine combat experience in twentieth-century war narratives. Fraser currently works on literary responses to the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam conflict, with a particular focus on the anxiety existing between ideological representations of masculinity and the graphic truth of experience in terms of both the corporeal and psychological self. He also works on American Memoir and autobiographical voice, and has written recently on contemporary music memoirs written by key figures from American punk and indie. Conducting the interview is last time's guest, Dr Janine Bradbury.

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University.

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavour of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our second episode is a discussion with Dr Janine Bradbury, a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at The University of York who, until November 2021, was part of the team at York St John University. Janine wrote her PhD at the University of Sheffield, where she also taught before coming to YSJU where she then worked for eight years. Janine is a poet and interdisciplinary scholar specialising in African American Literature, American popular culture, and, more recently, the colonial history of Trinidad and Tobago. In the interview you’re about to hear, she’ll talk about Black American Literature and the prevalence of the ‘passing narrative’, as well her interests in genealogy, popular culture and wrestling. Asking the questions will be last episode’s interviewee, Dr Anne-Marie Evans. 

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University.

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

This is a podcast in which lecturers on the Literature programme at York St John University will talk about their research interests and activities, to give you a flavour of the kinds of work they’re producing and the ideas that fascinate them.

And it’s a podcast with a twist, because as well as talking about their own work, they’re going to ask their colleagues questions about their work, so we’ll be learning more about what our team is doing alongside you, the listeners.

Our first interview is with Dr Anne-Marie Evans, Associate Head of School for English Literature at York St John University. Anne-Marie joined YSJU in 2011, after working previously at both the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Sheffield. At it was at the University of Sheffield that she also completed her PhD about literature, consumerism and the articulation of female identity in early twentieth century American literature. As you’ll hear in the interview, Anne-Marie has since published on such topics as Edith Wharton, Celebrity Autobiography and the Post-Apocalypse.

This episode was edited, produced and presented by Drs Adam Smith and Jo Waugh in association with the English Literature programme at York St John University. 

Cover Image: "Books or just art?" by Alexandre Dulaunoy, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Music was written and performed by Ketsa and licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License.