Event Details

Open Seminar in the wonderful surrounds of Bailrigg House -- featuring current research and open to all students

Open Eng Lit Seminar in the wonderful surrounds of Bailrigg House -- featuring current research and open to all students

...tea & coffee served

...chair: John Schad

...three PhDs presenting:

Beth Train-Brown – PhD student, Creative Writing

Blood in the Water is an illustrated pamphlet of poems in progress inspired by different species of sharks, interpreting 'coast' as a metaphorical boundary between land and sea/human and marine non-human that shifts constantly. Each poem includes a short epigraph about the species of shark and its phenomena (lemon sharks forming nurseries in mangrove forests, the enormous prehistoric Cretoxyrhina which went extinct for reasons unknown upon what is now Kansas, tiger sharks beaching themselves at increasing rates as coastlines change) then explores the relationship between shark/habitat/human.

Rob Campbell-Roscoe – PhD Student, Creative Writing

The Liminal Land: Researching and Fictionalising Morecambe's Intertidal Zone 

Rob Campbell-Roscoe is researching and writing about Morecambe, the setting for his contemporary circadian novel of short stories, Westenders. The intertidal zone is the land exposed twice a day by the tide’s retreat and across the whole of Morecambe Bay, this is very significant with typical shifts of about nine metres between low and high tide, creating an estimated additional area of sands and shallow channels nearing 300 square kilometres. The zone becomes a liminal setting for the novel’s nine central characters (all of whom are male), a place offering freedom, opportunity and solitude, but also elevating risk and danger.

Thomas Bailey – PhD Student, Creative Writing

Along the Coast

Coasts are defined variously as ‘sides’, ‘edges’, ‘margins’, and even ‘ellipses’ (OED, 2026). Even when purportedly in focus, they remain seemingly-tangential spaces. In summer 2016, Thomas Bailey walks the coastal paths with his father and is told the story of the Banana Caves and the pirates who drowned in them. Almost a decade later, in early 2026, the body of an old man washes up along the same shore; nobody knows who he is, but rumours are quick to spread. Taking on the mode of creative non-fiction, Bailey’s work interrogates the coast as a space both familiar and eerie, homely and haunted, full of memory and the forgotten.