Josephine Butler

Research Activity

As well as offering social and pastoral provisions for its students, Josephine Butler College is committed to promoting research among all its members. We do this in a number of ways, including:

  • the Josephine Butler Lecture and Seminar Series;
  • the new Advances in Biographical Methods Seminar Series, joint with Ustinov College, launched in October 2012;
  • currently in development, a collaborative research hub on sex work and sexual exploitation with Ustinov College and the School of Applied Social Sciences;
  • Scholars' Suppers, in which an academic or researcher introduces their area of study to our postgraduate students;
  • Dissertation Discussions, an opportunity for third- and fourth-year undergraduates to present their research to their peers;
  • the Butler Scholarly Journal, an online journal written by and for our members on academic themes, current affairs and topical issues.

Additionally, many of our staff, students and SCR members are active in research across a number of disciplines. These are some of our members and their areas of interest; follow the links for more details of their output.

Staff and SCR:

Adrian Simpson, College Principal

(Teaching staff, Department of Mathematical Sciences and Reader, School of Education)

Adrian’s research interests revolve around aspects related with the school-university transition in mathematics, particularly in how students come to understand the nature of formal argumentation in university mathematics and different ways in which students understand abstract mathematical structures. In recent years, he has become increasingly interested in ideas in cognitive psychology about abstract and contextual reasoning.

Selected publications:

Dr Jill Tidmarsh, Senior Tutor and Vice-Principal

Before becoming a full time Senior Tutor and Vice-Principal, Jill was active in research in applied social sciences.

Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus, College Mentor and SCR Vice-President

(Lecturer, Department of Humanities, Northumbria University)

Having gained my M.A. from Freiburg University, Germany, I undertook my doctoral research in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham and taught at both Freiburg and Durham before joining the Department of Humanities at Northumbria as a lecturer in January 2012. My PhD was titled 'The British Short Story of the First World War: Form, Function, and Canonisation' and I am currently revising the manuscript of a monograph based on this researchfor publication. My next research project will investigate the moral dimension of popular fiction through the two world wars, exploring how early twentieth-century fiction contributes to the establishing of a new, interpersonal paradigm of moral value based on a recognition of the other, as proposed in the work of twentieth-century moral philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur.

Selected publications:

  • Einhaus, Ann-Marie. The Other Memory of War: Short Stories of the First World War (monograph, in progress).
  • Korte, Barbara, and Ann-Marie Einhaus (eds). The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (London: Penguin, 2007).

Louise Gascoine, Resident Tutor

(PhD Student, School of Education)

Louise graduated from the University of St Andrews with MA Honours Geography in 2005. After gaining SEN school based experience and completing a Certificate in Psychology, Louise trained to teach secondary Geography at Newcastle University. She completed her M.Ed in Practitioner Enquiry (part time) with distinction, whilst teaching in a wide variety of school settings in North East England. At this time, she also worked on a freelance basis on a variety of projects as a research assistant including a Learning to Learn project with Dr Kate Wall in 2010, a rapid evidence review with Professor Steve Higgins also in 2010 and more recently a Sutton Trust Toolkit for Higher Education Access with Professor Carole Torgerson. In 2011, Louise was awarded a Durham Doctoral Studentship for PhD study in the School of Education. Louise’s research interests centre on the field of metacognition and in particular different methods used to explore this with school age children. The working title of her PhD is ‘Investigating the development of metacognition across school age children using Pupil Views Templates’. The research will use a visual tool; Pupil Views Templates (PVTs), in order to explore metacognition. Her thesis focuses on using PVTs as a research tool to explore developmental trends in declarative metacognition; it will be the first systematic sample of data using PVTs across the entire compulsory UK school age range (4-16 years). It will also include a systematic review of methodologies that have been used since 1992 to explain and measure or assess metacognition.

Publications:

  • Gascoine, L. (2010). Case Study: Pupil Perceptions of PLTS. Learning and Teaching Update (36), 9-10.
  • Wall, K., Higgins, S., Hall, E., & Gascoine, L. (2011). What Does Learning Look Like? Using cartoon story boards to investigate student perceptions of learning something new. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), September 12-15 2011, Berlin.
  • Gascoine, L. (2012) [Review of the book Doing Visual Research, by Claudia Mitchell]. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 35:3, 326-328. 

Postgraduate students:

Nicola Scott, MCR President

(PhD, Department of Mathematical Sciences)

My PhD research in the Numerical Analysis group examines the stability of a horizontal layer of a porous medium with an exothermic reaction on the lower boundary. For the Darcy and Brinkman models I have used linear methods to establish boundaries for which stationary and oscillatory convection occur and discussed the influence of the boundary reaction parameters. In further work I have shown that each of these models is continuously dependent on the reaction terms. Linear methods provide no information about stability below the instability curve and therefore non-linear methods are also necessary. My current work has therefore involved using an energy method to find an optimised stability curve for the Darcy model.

My work has been funded by a DTA award from EPSRC and some has been carried out in conjunction with my supervisor who is supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, 'Tipping points: mathematics, metaphors and meanings'.

Selected publications:

Anna Marchant

(PhD student, Department of Physics)

My broad research interest is in the field of ultracold quantum gases and the manipulation of atomic scattering properties using magnetic Feshbach resonances. My current PhD research focuses on the production of Bose-Einstein condensates with tunable atomic interactions and their application in the study of bright matter-wave solitons. These self-stabilizing wave packets are well localized due to attractive atom-atom interactions and hence show great potential as surface probes for the study of shortrange atom-surface interactions.

Selected publications:

  • A L Marchant, S Händel, S A Hopkins, T P Wiles and S L Cornish (2012). Bose-Einstein condensation of 85Rb by direct evaporation in an optical dipole trap. Phys. Rev. A 85, 053647.
  • S Händel, A L Marchant, T P Wiles, S A Hopkins and S L Cornish (2012). Magnetic transport apparatus for the production of ultracold atomic gases in the vicinity of a dielectric surface. Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 013105.

Recent conference papers:

  • Photon 12, Durham, UK (2012). Controlled formation and reflection of bright solitary matter-waves.

Recent poster presentations:

  • ICAP 2012, Palaiseau, France.

Pete Tollan

(PhD student, Department of Earth Sciences)

My PhD investigates the recycling of material during the collision of oceanic tectonic plates. During this process, the denser plate ‘subducts’ beneath the more buoyant plate. As it descends, it heats up and releases fluids into the overlying mantle with a unique chemical composition. This in turn changes the physical and chemical properties of the mantle, and leads to the formation of magma and volcanoes. I am analysing the chemistry of chunks of mantle, erupted out of volcanoes to trace the passage of these subduction fluids, in order to further our understanding how the chemistry of the Earth has changed over millennia.

Publications:

  • Tollan P.M.E., Bindeman I.N., Blundy J.D. (2012) Cumulate xenoliths from St. Vincent, Lesser Antilles Island Arc: a window into upper crustal differentiation of mantle-derived basalts. Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 163:189-208.

Recent presentations and posters:

  • 2012: Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group, Durham University (poster).
  • 2012: Geochemistry Group, Open University (presentation).
  • 2012: Conference on Caribbean Geology, University of Bristol (presentation).
  • 2012: Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (presentation).

David Burn

(PhD student, Department of Physics)

Information storage is an important feature in many electronics devices such as computers and mobile phones. Magnetism is often used permanent information storage and recently the interaction between electrons and magnetised material has lead to huge advances and the development of a kind of electronics known as spintronics. This advance lead to the 2007 Nobel prize and now spintronic read heads in computer hard drives are now standard in our home computers and internet giants such as Google or Facebook would not exist without them.

New memory concepts based on nano-scale magnetic wires where information is represented as magnetic domains, separated by boundaries called domain walls, is currently attracting a lot of research attention. These devices have the potential to compete with current memory technologies on speed, reliability and energy efficiency, but with the advantage of requiring no power to retain information.

To develop these new devices requires an understanding of how domains and domain walls behave and how they can be manipulated in spintronic circuits. My research uses focussed Ga+ beams to locally modify the magnetic properties in nanowires which combined with geometrical factors provides a mechanism to control these domain walls in nanowire devices.

Selected publications:

Michael Shallcross

(PhD student, Department of English Studies)

I began studying at Durham University in October 2010, researching a thesis on 'G.K. Chesterton and Parody' under the supervision of Dr. John Nash. My research is funded by a Durham University studentship. My thesis examines the parodic motifs permeating Chesterton's diverse output, with particular emphasis upon his detective fiction, but also with reference to his nonsense verse, journalism, novels, critical essays, and public performances.

My undergraduate dissertation (undertaken at Sheffield Hallam University) won the Routledge Prize for the year's best undergraduate dissertation in the English dept at that university.

Selected publications:

  • Chapter in an essay collection on G.K. Chesterton and the city (forthcoming).

Conference presentations:

  • ‘Burlesque Biography: The Public Man and the Private Eye in Wyndham Lewis and G.K. Chesterton’,  ('New Work in Modernist Studies' conference, University of London, December 2011).
  • 'The Parodist's Game': Scrutiny of Cultural Play in Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, ('Inventions of the Text' seminar series, Durham University English Studies, November 2011).
  • ‘Puck in Pimlico: Urban Incongruity and Boundaried Play in G.K. Chesterton's The Blue Cross’ ('Chesterton and the City' Conference, UCL, September 2011).

Jonathan Prior

(PhD student, Department of Archaeology)

My PhD looks at the impact of glassblowing on the Roman glass industry. I am trying to find evidence to quantify literary claims that glassblowing either was completely responsible for the spread of the material to the masses and that it came to rival ceramics in terms of usage, or that glass usage was already on the rise due to advances mould-pressing techniques and that the glass was used alongside ceramics rather than as a replacement. I am also investigating how quickly it became the dominant method of production and spread across the Empire after its invention.

My research MA thesis was 'Makers and Their Marks: The Ancient Function and Modern Usefulness of Stamps on Roman Glass and Ceramics,' (University of Victoria, 2010).

Presentations:

  • 2013 Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference at Kings College, London (paper presentation).
  • ‘Tracing the Impact of Glassblowing on the Roman Economy’ to a (University of Durham, February 2012).
  • Guest lecture, ‘Ancient Glass’ (University of Regina, January 2012).
  • Guest lecture, ‘Studying History Through Archaeology’ (University of Regina, January 2012).

Emma Talbot

(PhD student, Department of Chemistry)

I am in the third year of my PhD. My research is based around inkjet printed droplets, the flows within these droplets as they dry, and the end deposits. The aim of the project is to control/manipulate particle motion during the drying and deposition process. The project is part of a larger consortion with the University of Cambridge and the University of Leeds.

Publications:

  • ‘The drying of picolitre droplets on substrates with varied wettability and conductivities’ (E. Talbot, A. Berson, P. Brown and C.Bain, Physical Review E, 85, 061604 (2012)).

Conference papers:

  • ‘Flows within drying mixtures’ (NIP28 (2012)), Quebec, September 2012.

James Carthew

(PhD student, School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)

My research is currently based around investigating the involvement of two specified proteins Nup88 and Nesprin 2 within cancer development, more specifically Breast and Colorectal cancer types, through bioimaging, biochemical and cell biology techniques. I have further research interests in the involvement of these two proteins within multiple cellular activities including transport, cellular migration, stress signalling and maintaining cellular architecture.

As an undergraduate at Josephine Butler College, I wrote a literature review on the roles of Nup88 within the regulation of gene expression and further performed a five-week research project investigating the nuclear positioning of Nesprin 2 within a range of cell types.

Publications:

  • Lu W, Schneider M, Neumann S, Jaeger VM, Taranum S, Munck M, Cartwright S, Richardson C, Carthew J, Noh K, Goldberg M, Noegel AA, Karakesisoglou I. (2012). Nesprin interchain associations control nuclear size. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2012 Oct;69(20):3493-509. Epub 2012 Jun 1.

Poster presentations:

  • British Biophysical Society conference, July 2012.

Ankit Kumar

(PhD student, Department of Geography)

I am a second year PhD researcher and a member of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Energy at Durham Energy Institute. My PhD project, entitled ‘Electricity access for rural India: Is micro-generation the solution?’, aims to investigate whether new models of electricity provision, like micro-renewable energy and micro grids, can be used as an effective tool to provide electricity access to India's rural population.

Unlike previous studies on energy in India, this research uses an integrated socio-technical approach deriving inputs from the fields of technology, social sciences, governance, economics, and so on. It identifies the gaps in existing policy and planning approaches and seeks to develop an understanding of the various social aspects that may lead to acceptance or rejection of new provision models. This work will also help develop an understanding of a big consumer group for energy provision companies willing to devise and work on innovative models of provision.

Publications:

Research Blogs:

Marie Shackleford

(PhD student, Department of Chemistry)

I'm a first year PhD student in chemistry sponsored by EPSRC and Unilever and my research project is ‘Lifetime of an active ingredient’. Using a range of techniques, the different stages in the usage lifetime of antibacterial agents, such as triclosan, will be studied. Going from the pure compound, mixing it into formulations and when it is diluted at the point of usage; I'm interested in what phase the agent is in and where it wants to go. This study will use methods including solid state and solution NMR, UV/Vis and fluorescence spectroscopy, Stopped Flow and Fluorescence assays.

Oliver Kinsey

(Masters student, School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)

I am currently doing a Masters by research in Biological Sciences. My research is titled 'Modelling population dynamics of South African ungulates within a closed ecological system'. We are attempting to be able to model and thus predict for the future changes in populations of antelope on a game reserve near Pilanesberg and to find the effects that climate, sex ratios and population off-take have on population numbers both short- and long--term.