Text only
University of Aberdeen Takes you to the main page for this section

PhD students: research outlines

"as we seek a better understanding of the great changes currently affecting us, Scotland and ireland offer fertile ground for students and researchers alike."
Mary McAleese, President of Ireland

Cassilda Alcobia

Email: cassilda.alcobia@abdn.ac.uk

Cassilda completed her undergraduate degree in Translation Studies in Lisbon, and came to Aberdeen in 2001, where she graduated from the Institute's MLitt in Irish and Scottish Studies. She is now in the first year of a PhD which aims to explore contrasting discourses developing in the face of violence in Northern Ireland by focusing on 'official' accounts and on a broad range of cultural representations of this same violence (in poetry, drama, novel, film, the visual arts, murals and posters). Presently she is focusing on representations of the shattered body, whose unspeakable reality places a particular strain on modes of representation, as it functions as witness to the 'petrifying agency of violence' and as communicative text eliciting responses.

Sukanya Basu

Email: sukanya.basu@abdn.ac.uk

Having done a M.A in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, Sukanya completed her MLitt in Irish and Scottish Studies from RIISS in 2003.  Her doctoral research focuses on the concept of the poet-critic, exploring the psychological, aesthetic and commercial imperatives acting on a poet to produce a body of prose and demonstrates the related effects upon the gradual development of his poetic voice and its authority in the sphere of readership and public consumption.  Using the prose of Seamus Heaney as her prime example, she examines how it communicates the ethical, political and aesthetic assumptions and commitments of his art through his self-reflexive reading of four specific poet-critics Mandelstam, Yeats, Eliot and Wordsworth.

Kevin Kenny

Email: KevinAKenny@aol.com

Kevin Kenny is researching the Irish in the East of Scotland from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. He is particularly keen to use personal migrant testimony such as letters, diaries, and memoirs and would appreciate hearing from anyone with such source material.

Margaret Maxwell

Email: margaret.maxwell@abdn.ac.uk

Margaret graduated from the University of Aberdeen with an MA (hons) in English in 2003, and again from Aberdeen in 2004 with an MLitt in Irish & Scottish Studies. Unimaginatively stuck in an Aberdeen time warp, her current research looks at communication, translation, and silence in contemporary Irish drama. It considers the subjective nature of individual utterance, and the corollary that communication refracts a singularly mapped world, through the prism of George Steiner's insight that we speak not only to communicate, 'but also to conceal, to leave unspoken', that the 'ability of human beings to misinform modulates from outright lying to silence'. She may have preferred to withhold this communication...

Barry Robertson

Email: bg.robertson@abdn.ac.uk

Barry is a graduate of The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and recently completed the Mlitt in Irish and Scottish Studies. He is currently researching for a PhD on one of the key Scottish aristocratic families of the early modern period: the Gordons of Huntly.The period of study will be c.1610 - c.1716. Key themes will include a) religion b) Royalism/Jacobitism and attitudes to the 1707 Union c) family finances, land, debt etc d) Noble culture, Anglicisation e) the wider 'Three Kingdoms' and European contexts.

Paul Fraser Shanks

Email: p.f.shanks@abdn.ac.uk

Paul Shanks graduated from Aberdeen in 2001 with an MA (Hons) in English and Scottish literature, and again from Aberdeen in 2003 with an MLitt in Irish-Scottish Studies (RIISS). He is currently completing a PhD at RIISS on James Kelman by the light of his key literary forebears, especially Beckett, Joyce and Kafka. An essential component to this study is the context of RIISS and the pioneering research in Irish and Scottish studies currently taking place at the institute.

Daniel Smith

Email: hyosho@yahoo.co.uk

Daniel moved to Aberdeen in 1997 and graduated from the University in 2001 with an MA in English Literature. He then did the Mlitt in Irish and Scottish Studies, and is currently working towards a PhD in the literature of Northern Ireland. Daniel's current focus is on how representations of Northern Ireland and the Troubles affect traditional notions of truth - both documentary truth and aesthetic truth. Censorship, violence, and the intertwined discourses of poetry and politics are all implicated in this process.

Arts and Humanities Research Council

The AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies >>

 

News and Events