Event Archive
This is an archive of past events within the Department of English Studies. Please see our current events for forthcoming activities.
Some of our public events are recorded and are available as podcasts via our Research English At Durham blog.

Symposium of Sound ‘The rest is silence’
A two-day conference supported by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership, that looks at 'sound' from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
Keynote speakers and performers
Professor Helen Abbott, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham
Dr Edward Allen, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Aurélia Lassaque, bilingual poet and singer in French and Occitan
The Symposium of Sound is a two-day conference supported by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. We invite abstracts for papers of twenty minutes in length on the theme of ‘sound’: its creation, imitation, and its relationship with language. Proposals may range across fields of study, with interdisciplinary approaches particularly welcome in areas such as literature, music, performance and creative practice, modern languages, and linguistics. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Utterance, verbal and non-verbal
- Metre, rhythm, and rhyme
- Timbre and voicing
- Pitch and tone
- Echo and imitation
- Song and lyric in performance and on the page
- Phonetics and phonology
- Soundscapes and sounds in place
- Orality and aurality
- Dialect and vernacularity
- Gossip, rumour and bruit
- Noise
- Sound media (including radio and film)
- Repetition and repetitiveness
- Silence and the absence of sound
Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and a short biography to symposiumofsound2018@gmail.com by 14th June 2018.
Registration for the conference is free.
For further information, see the conference website.
Contact symposiumofsound2018@gmail.com for more information about this event.
READ Blog
Research in English At Durham (READ) blog showcasing the the literary research emerging from the Department of English Studies
Events
We host a large number of conferences, lectures and seminars each year, many of them open to the public. Find out more on our Events page.
Podcasts
Many of our public lectures, seminars and conferences are recorded, and can be listened to as podcasts.
Next Event
- 20th January 2021
- Sensory Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Online (Zoom)
- Dr Erica Fretwell (University of Albany) and Dr Shannon Draucker (Siena College)