Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

Research by Aberystwyth University on the emotional impact of art and literature has been chosen as one of the highlights of the Being Human Festival showcase to be held at Senate House, London. The ‘Quantified Romantics’ project is being led by Professor Richard Marggraf Turley from the University’s English & Creative Writing Department, and Professor Reyer Zwiggelaar from Computer Science. Together, they’ve been developing a technique to measure our emotional response to art – in particular, the poetry, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. Do gothic novels really stir the pulse, as their Romantic authors claimed? Can paintings of yawning chasms, nightmarish creatures, ruined abbeys in dark forests and rocky precipices actually cause measurable chills of terror? In their pursuit of answers, Marggraf Turley and Zwiggelaar, with Research Associate Tom Blanchard, have been using a specially-designed ‘smart’ wristband to collect biometric data on how people react emotionally ...

Some of Aberystwyth University’s world-leading research will be showcased at one of the world's biggest literary festivals which gets underway later this week. Six internationally recognised Aberystwyth academics and two Honorary Fellows will be speaking at this year’s Hay Festival which runs from 23 May to 2 June. Last year’s festival attracted more than 225,000 visitors. Thursday 23 May at Landmarc 100 Stage at 7pm Professor Richard Marggraf Turley, Dr Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Professor Howard Thomas , all from Aberystwyth University, will deliver the 2013 INSPIRE Lecture on Literature and Sustainability as winners of a competition set up by the Institute for Sustainable Practice Innovation and Resource Effectiveness at University of Wales Trinity Saint David , supported by ASLE-UKI. The paper explores how key Shakespeare plays engage with a crisis of food supply, distribution and sustenance – a crisis with contemporary resonances and one in which, through his business deal...

A new literary magazine that has been created by first year students in the Department of Welsh at Aberystwyth University as part of a module they are studying, is to be launched on Saturday (9 June) at the Urdd Eisteddfod. The students taking the module 'Introduction to Welsh Professional' have been given an ambitious project to work on this season, to publish and edit a literary magazine called Y Ddraig (The Dragon). This bulky 117 page edition will include examples of creative work of students from more than one of the university’s departments. It will contain short stories, poems, micro pieces of literature, as well as interviews with interesting individuals. The magazine will be launched on the University stand at the Urdd in Glynllifon at 12 o'clock on Saturday, 9 June. It will provide Aberystwyth University’s new generation of young poets and authors the opportunity to showcase their work. Professor Margaret Haycock and Dr Bleddyn Huws are coordinating the mo...

Archive discoveries by researchers at Aberystwyth University suggest that lying beneath the autumnal mellowness of one of the nation’s best-loved poems, John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”, is a murkier world of banking crisis, rising prices and striking workers. The previously unseen documents also suggest that the traditional site of the famous “stubble-plains” in “To Autumn” should be revised.  Long believed to describe the picturesque water-meadows lining the River Itchen, Keats’s cornfields are more likely, the researchers argue, to portray the west-facing slopes of St Giles’s Hill, overlooking Winchester from its eastern extremity. Generations of fans swooning along the "Keats Walk" may have been lead - literally - up the garden path by previous scholarly studies. When Keats arrived in Winchester in summer 1819, he did so in the midst of rising tensions over corn prices and agricultural working conditions.  Bankers-turned-landowners were snapping up grain-producing land in W...

West Wales to host a major new literature festival | Wales | Creative Boom Magazine Literature Wales is pleased to announce that a lively new festival celebrating the very best of literature will be held at Dinefwr Park and Castle in west Wales in 2012. The Dinefwr Literature Festival is a collaboration between Literature Wales, the National Trust, and the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David (as lead partner in the Coracle programme).