Travel and conferences

"I am very grateful for the generous funding given by the RKEC as I would not have been able to travel to and stay in Rochester, New York for the entirety of the conference without it.

I was able to attend the NCSA 2022 conference and deliver a paper entitled 'Creatures and Caricatures: Irish Representation in Lord Chamberlain's Plays'. This was the first conference I was able to attend in person and was a great opportunity to network with fellow researchers, including some who are studying similar subjects to mine. It also was a great opportunity to watch others present and for me to learn about current studies happening in my field."

 

"I am very grateful to the RKEC for the generous funding I received in 2019. This support enabled me to travel to Italy and to visit the University of Brescia. Whilst there, I delivered a presentation to an International audience on the topic of ‘Medicalising Discourses in Herbal Supplement Advertising’.

The conference entitled ‘Argumenting Health Communication in the Digital Era’ was most relevant to my area of interests and I forged positive and potentially fruitful connections with academics and healthcare professionals.

By participating in the conference, I gained valuable insight into other areas of healthcare communication, in particular digital healthcare communication, an increasingly relevant and timely field of inquiry. Ultimately, I augmented my knowledge and expertise of multimodal critical linguistics and facilitated a greater network of professionals for my future career."

"Thanks to the generous support of the RKEC, I was able to travel to Manchester to attend and deliver a paper at the 2019 British Association for Applied Linguistics conference. As this year’s BAAL’s theme this year is ‘Broadening the Horizons of Applied Linguistics’, I was excited to share with the audience some of the findings of my thesis since I outlined new frameworks for glocalisation analysis. I presented my paper titled ‘The Multimodality of Glocalisation and Its Complexity: A Case Study on a Multinational Corporation on Social Media’ and the presentation was very well-received. The questions and feedback from my presentation enabled me to further refine my thesis and I was also approached by another student who expressed interest in collaborating with me in the future.

Since BAAL is UK’s largest multidisciplinary applied linguistics conference, it also gave me the opportunity to catch up with the latest research in areas outside of my own. The different presentations and conversations with other attendees really opened up my eyes to how applied linguistics researchers can improve prison conditions, facilitate doctor-patient interaction and collaborating with the police to solve crimes. The 20 sessions and 4 plenary speeches in the conference allowed me to engage with other perspectives and methodologies. I am really grateful for the funding from RKEC as the experience helped inform both my thesis and potential future publications based on it."

"RKEC funding helped support my travel to the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) biennial meeting held this year at the University of New Mexico in the USA. 

With the aid I received, I was able to participate in the 2019 International Society of Anglo-Saxonists conference held this year in New Mexico, USA. By attending and having the chance to present a paper relating to cultural essentialism and research/teaching practices, I was afforded the unique opportunity to discuss these challenging issues with leading scholars in the field of Old English literature studies. In addition, through the critical specialist feedback I received I was also able to gain perspective on the positioning and potential impact of my larger PhD thesis project."

"I am currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Linguistics with a focus on Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) vocabulary acquisition and learning. In March, thanks to the generous support of the Research, Knowledge and Exchange Committee, I was able to travel to Atlanta, Georgia, to deliver a paper at the 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference. I presented the results of my first study "Multi-modal Arabic Word Learning in Novice L1 English Speakers: Investigating factors that affect response time and accuracy” and the presentation was very well received. This was an important conference and other researchers who work with Arabic and AFL teachers attended my session. I was also able to speak to a member of Georgetown University Press who expressed interest in publishing the results of my fifth study. Moreover, I attended a number of interesting talks including one on the value of thinking about language teachers as end users of research. As part of my Impact goals, I have been presenting at teacher training events for EAL leads in the UK over the past year. At a recent speaking event, I was able to share information on a new portal that provides jargon-free write-ups of research for language teachers. I was only able to share this information thanks to having attended the conference."

"October 2018 saw the 200^th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. Thanks to the generous support and funding from the Research, Knowledge and Exchange Committee at the School of English, I was able to co-plan and host a half-day symposium celebrating both Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. The event had six speakers from the Schools of English and History at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. We had an equal split of male and female speakers, along with an even balance of tenured academics and PGRs and ECRs. ‘Frankenreads’ brought together academics and researchers who worked on the same period, engendered a sense of collaboration between students, researchers and academics, and fostered interdisciplinary professional relationships. I really wanted Nottingham to take part in ‘Frankenreads’, the international celebration of Shelley’s Frankenstein created by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and this symposium showcased Nottingham’s contribution and commitment to Romantic scholarship and research."

"Between July 6th and 20th a group of Nottingham PG students led by Dr. Cat Jarman, Bristol University, conducted a joint archaeological investigation with Dr. Vyacheslav Skorohod and students from the Chernihiv National Teachers’ Training University. The site excavated was a late 9th/early 10th century Viking Age settlement site located near the village of Vypovziv Ukraine. The goal of the project was to introduce Nottingham students to archaeological methodology, thus widening their interdisciplinary understanding, as well as to provide an environment for culture and knowledge exchange. This effort was made possible by the combined funding support provided by the RKEC and Cascade. This project not only allowed access to the generally unattainable information on Viking settlement in Eastern Europe but also created a space for mutual cooperation and knowledge exchange.

By organizing and participating in this project I have not only increased my understanding and knowledge of the early Viking Age in Eastern Europe but am also able to include the results of the excavation in my own PhD research. Furthermore, through this cooperative effort, a joint publication will be issued regarding the results of the investigation."

 "The funding I have received from the RKEC committee over the past years has been of tremendous help in two ways. In the first instance, it has enabled me to recruit participants for my PhD studies. This would have been difficult and likely impossible to do otherwise, since monetary compensation creates a strong incentive for research participation. Naturally, a descent number of participants significantly increases the robustness and generalisability of the findings, which provides the foundations for quality research. Secondly, RKEC funding has made it possible for me to attend the “Figurative Thought and Language Conference” in Braga, Portugal last October, where not only did I get a chance to meet a lot of interesting people and influential researchers in the field, but I also had the opportunity to present some of my own findings in two different talks. This has had a great impact on my research as I have received valuable feedback from established researchers, but I believe this has also helped to further promote the kind of research that is conducted in the school. As a result I was approached by researchers with similar interests and was invited to give a talk in a session they were planning for the upcoming seminar “Metaphor studies at the intersection of multiple disciplines” in Liège, next year. Overall, the RKEC funding has greatly contributed towards the timely completion of my PhD."

"With the combined support of the Graduate School Travel Prize and the Midlands3Cities Student Development Fund and Research and Training Support Grant, I spent the first two weeks of June 2018 conducting archival research at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. The ATL contains the largest collection of manuscripts and research material in the world relating to Katherine Mansfield’s life and work. Having access to such a substantial source of information has contributed greatly to the development of my thesis and its central arguments, and the information that I have gathered will continue to inform my work as I write my remaining chapters.

Staying in Wellington for two weeks also enabled me to explore various sites associated with Mansfield’s early life; my visit to the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden was particularly enlightening as it complemented my existing knowledge of the writer’s colonial upbringing, as well as providing an opportunity to discuss my research with other members of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society that were present during the time of my visit."

"I was supported by the Graduate School Travel Prize for the ‘Modernism and Modernities East, West and South’ conference, taking place in Fudan University in Shanghai this July. The international conference figures the fruition of the collaborative effort between Fudan, Hamburg and Macquarie universities, with the papers given constellating highly diverse and vigorous academic endeavours in incorporating China and far east into the ongoing discussions on transnational modernism. My paper investigating T. S. Eliot’s engagement with and representation of chinoiserie was well received, and speaks well with the other papers in my panel. The travel prize provides me with the opportunity to communicate my research to a larger audience, make and renew some professional connections,  and explore Chinese academia as well as the city of Shanghai. For all these and not least for the very pleasant conference experience I was lucky enough to have enjoyed, I was grateful for the generous support I received from the Graduate School."

"Thanks to the generous award by the School of English Research Committee and the Graduate School Travel Prize, I was able to visit Special Collections Libraries in two different countries to examine a number of manuscripts I needed to include in my thesis. In early August I visited the National Library in Vienna, the St Peter’s monastery library in Salzburg, and the Belgian Royal Library in Brussels. As these manuscripts were not available online or in facsimile form, the funding made it possible for me to travel there to see them in person, and to spend a few days in each place to analyse the runic material present in these works and to photograph the pages required for my catalogue. This was a useful opportunity because it allowed me to discover new material, and collect the final information necessary to finish my thesis. I had a pleasant and educational trip, during which I learned about the workings of these three libraries, and had an occasion to practice my languages."

"Thanks to SDF and RTSG funding from Midlands 3 Cities I was able to undertake a month long research trip to America this summer. This trip was essential to my PhD, which looks at the influence of North American colonial discourse on representations of space and place in seventeenth-century English literature. I spent time in various archives including the Massachusetts Historical Society, Harvard, and the Library of Virginia, as well as visiting various living history sites across New England and Virginia. One of the most exciting parts of my trip was visiting the Jamestown archaeological site, where I was lucky enough to spend the day exploring the site and collections with some of the curators and archaeologists. My research trip has undoubtedly strengthened both the archival and interdisciplinary facets of my project, as well being a truly amazing experience for me personally."