Patricia Maia Noronha is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. She is a freelance journalist and writer based in Lisbon. Her first fiction book, O Elo Invisível, was released in 2019. She regularly publishes in literary magazines like Revista Caliban, coordinated by the Portuguese poet Maria João Cantinho. She is a writer for the journal Nature and other media. The aim of her PhD research is to write a novel inspired by the emigration experience of her family to Brazil in the first half of the 20th century.
'On Mourning the Living (Two novellas – One novel)'
My PhD project involves writing a novel, Mourning the Living, inspired by the emigration experience of my family to the Amazon state of Pará, Brazil, in the first half of the 20th century. The narrative incorporates two intertwined novellas told in two different timelines - one depicting the Portuguese diaspora in post-colonial Brazil and the Indigenous communities of the Amazon, while the other starts in Portugal in 1990 and extends to the present day, with the integration of Portugal into the European Union serving as a faint background. One of the main methods of my research is in-person interviews with Portuguese emigrants, and Brazilian natives with Portuguese and indigenous ancestry. These testimonies have been fundamental to setting the background of the story and defining the characters of my novel Mourning the Living. I will also share extracts of some chapters of the novel and some of the motivations that led me to conduct this PhD Project.
Keywords: postcolonialism; displacement; Eurocentrism; fiction; migration; Anthropocene.
Dr. Heena Heena is a historian of early modern India. She is working as a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her project examines the social history of domestic servants in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Awadh state in India.
'Time Prediction and Astrology in Pre-Modern North India (1700-1900)'
This paper explores the social and political history of astrology and time prediction during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries in India. It focuses on the state of Awadh, which emerged as an independent kingdom after the fall of Mughal rule and was annexed by British officials in 1856. The paper examines how astrology and reading of a future time were imbued in politics and social lives of commoners in North India and to what extent. It answers why and how the Awadh royal state, nobles, and common citizens patronised astrologers even at a time when strong reservations were voiced by Wahabi puritans and British official/non-officials. Mobilising Persian, English, and Urdu writings and visual sources, the paper contributes to the scholarship on eighteenth-century colonial transition, early modern divisions of science and craft, the social history of astrology and courtly politics, and the history of social time.
Keywords: postcolonialism, India, time, astrology, socio-political attitudes.
Dr. Tomos Williams has recently completed his doctorate at Swansea University. His thesis, “From Gutenberg Galaxy to Google Galaxy – Contemporary Literature, Technology and the Legacies of Modernism and Postmodernism”, critically examines modernist and postmodernist literature alongside contemporary literary representations of technology. Shortly after completing his thesis, he took up a post as Academic Services Officer for Anglia Ruskin University College, where he swiftly settled into the routines of full-time work.
'Retrogaming, Retrowriting: Video Games, Nostalgia and the Pastoral Idyll in Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young'
In “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth describes a return to one of his favourite natural spaces. The place itself has not changed: Wordsworth can see the same “pastoral farms” that he fondly took refuge in “mid the din // of towns and cities”, but he sees it differently, yearning for the Idyll of his memory. For contemporary writers, this nostalgia for Arcadia has come to the arcades. Through close reading of If All the World and Love Were Young, an ekphrastic poetry collection that depicts the retro-game Super Mario World, alongside visual art such as Breughel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and screenshots from Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, this paper examinates how Stephen Sexton combines and represents the reality with the virtual worlds of memory, art and retro-gaming. Sexton re-imagines the pastoral struggle between the immortal and the ephemeral for the digital age, tread a liminal space between modernist and postmodernist technique, a space most often referred to as meta-modernism. The project therefore delves into an assortment of “isms”, with a particular focus on the impact of modernism and postmodernism on the contemporary moment.
Keywords: ekphrasis, idyll, virtual, natural, memory.