This week, as a new year begins, we are taking a look back over the past 12 months and celebrating everything that’s happened here on the Literature programme this year. In this post, we’ll be rounding up the big stories from the blog. We don’t have room to mention them all, but here are the ones that made a real splash on the blog!
Tomorrow be hearing what you said about your time with us in 2018.Â
Dissertation Corner
2018 saw the launch of a new feature on the blog, in which Third Year students discussed the research they were undertaking as part of their dissertations.
With projects on everything from racial passing to crime fiction, from 19th-century hymn-writing to gender and the Gothic, there was lots of interesting and original work happening.
Read interviews with last year’s students here.Â
The YSJ Big Summer Read
Although it was neck-and-neck between Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (a beloved text that many of our recently graduated Third Years remembered from their Freshman semester) and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Whitehead clinched it at the last minute and won our online poll.
This tale of escape from slavery proved a hugely popular text for this year’s YSJ Big Summer Read, with more people than ever joining in. In unprecedented scenes, it wasn’t just staff and students from Literature taking part, but people from all across the university!
We loved seeing every tweeting about the book, not just to see so many people enjoying taking part, but because we got to see the book papped at all manner of exotic locations!
See what everyone thought here!Â
YSJ Comfort Reads
In a new feature, inspired by the 2018 Libraries Week theme of ‘Reading for Wellbeing’, we invited our students to share their favourite comfort reads. We heard about everything from T. H. White to Thomas Hardy in a series of sensitive, entertaining and inspiring posts.
Join us again tomorrow for the third and final of our retrospectives, where we’ll be hearing all about 2018 on the Literature programme… in your words!
Did you see our post on the trips and events of 2018? Check it out here!