PhD student research interests
Stella Halkyard
Working title for research: "Wales and Welshness imagined and represented in visual culture, film and Welsh writing in English, 1936-53".
Main Supervisor: Dr Anke Bernau
Panel: Dr Maria Balshaw
Stage of research: First Year (Part Time).
As a first year PhD student in English and American Studies my research is only in its early stages. Using theoretical concepts such as cultural hybridity, the interstitial, margins and minorities, habitable texts, and migratory aesthetics, I am beginning to think about the notion of Welsh identity as it is imagined and represented in specific documentary films and photographs (Humphrey Jennnings and Edith Tudor Hart), paintings and book illustrations (Ceri Richards and Brenda Chamberlain) and collections of poems and short stories (Lynette Roberts and Alun Lewis) from the period around the Second World War. I am starting to grapple with notions of Place, Space and Landscape using frameworks derived from cultural geography through a series of micro-histories. I am currently working on Lynette Roberts' epic, war poem "God with Stainless Ears" (published by Fabers in 1951) having recently "found" some previously "unknown" archive material connected to the poem's prehistory in her Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas in Austin.