Podcasts

Welcome to our podcasts, featuring lectures, interviews and readings by some of our researchers. Find us at Anchor.fm if you want to subscribe to our podcasts via your preferred app.

We’re aware that audio recordings may not be fully accessible for everyone. Due to copyright and our available resources, we are not able to provide transcripts of all podcasts, but if you require a text version please contact read.durhamenglish@durham.ac.uk and we’ll do our very best to help you on a case by case basis.

What’s New

Browse by Literary Period

A complete listing of all our podcasts, organised according to the literary period they cover.

Public Lectures

Recordings of public lectures delivered by our academics and researchers. The Department of English runs or co-organises a wide variety of lectures every year, for the benefit of a broad audience. To find details of future events, subscribe to our monthly events newsletter.

Poetry Aloud

These podcasts include readings and discussions of poetry by our published creative writers and researchers. They also celebrate poetry as a spoken art form, with public readings of well known poets run by the Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

The Uses of Literature

This series of podcasts explores how reading and studying literature can have a wider social value. Understanding how literary writers have represented issues such as ageing, world politics, or science can help us to construct better societies today.

Literature, History, Culture

This series of podcasts looks at the role literature plays in wider history and culture. How does literature reflect and offer a window onto historical moments? What role does literature play within society as a whole?

All Podcasts

• Literature Lectures
  • Easter Lectures 2014
    • Dramatising the speaking voice: John Donne and George Herbert
    • Hesiod’s Works and Days. Myth, Realism and Every Man
    • Masculinity, Mimicry and the Crisis of Agency in the Colonial Contact-zone: A Study of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”
    • Text Within Text
    • The Saracen ‘Other’ in Middle English Romance
    • Women, Science, and the Body in Mid-Victorian Literary Culture
  • Easter Lectures 2015
    • And All that Jazz: Popular Music as Narrative in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night
    • Chivalric Identity in Medieval Romance: Colour and Clothing in Perceval
    • Fellowship from Sir Gawain to Malory and the Rise of ‘Civic’ Culture
    • The Werewolf’s Rational Soul in the Medieval Romance
  • Festive Traditions in the North East
    • A Funny Kind of Devotion? Laughter in the Biblical Drama of Late Medieval Towns and Cities
    • Catholic Recusants in Performance
    • Corpus Christi Plays in Durham
    • Making music in the North-east: waits and minstrels around the region
    • Worms, Stags, and Other Folk Performances
  • Ghosts: The Evidence of Spirits
    • ‘Ghostly Language’: Wordsworth’s Ghosts and Spectral Subjectivity
    • Ghosts and Dickens
    • Ghosts and Goblins in Japanese Art
  • Late Summer Lectures 2014
    • Authorship and Hysterical Woman in Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat
    • Boy with Apple: The “Comfortable Uncanny” in the Films of Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  • Late Summer Lectures 2015
    • ‘Your New Hospital for the Intellectuals’: The Literary Salon as an Alternative Space for War
    • A Literary History of Chocolate
    • Narrating Everyday British Life by Authors of Muslim Heritage, Then and Now
    • Old English Riddles and the Dream of the Rood
    • Victorian Vikings and the World of Saga Tourism
  • Late Summer Lectures 2016
    • Alchemy, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Holy Grail
    • Breathing in Science Fiction
    • Cuthbert: A Not So Benevolent Saint
    • The Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination
    • The Gothic Theology of Frankenstein
  • Late Summer Lectures 2017
    • Albion: Change, Rebirth and Stagnancy in The Middle English Prose Brut Chronicle
    • Dickens’s Ghosts: An Altered Perspective
    • Fiction and the Victorian Vivisector
    • The Coming Races: Eugenics in Utopian Literature
    • Tics in the Theatre: The ‘Quiet Audience’ and the Neurodivergent Spectator
  • Late Summer Lectures 2018
    • (S)he’s just not that into you: Resisting Love in Medieval Romance Literature
    • Beginnings and Endings in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
    • Registers of petition in the holograph manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve
    • Shakespeare, Henry VIII, and the day the Globe burned down
    • Snake Women: Crafting Power in Medieval Origin Stories
    • The Stream of Consciousness in William Wordsworth and James Joyce
  • Late Summer Lectures 2019
  • Literary Criticism and the Fantastic
    • Fantasies of Childhood in Peter Pan
    • Transgressing the Uncanny Valley: Cybersex and Android Incest
    • Vampires and Bodysnatchers
    • Vampires and Poltergeists
  • Modern Literature, Culture, and the Archives of the Secret State
  • Late Summer Lectures 2013
    • Dickensian Steampunk: Charles Dickens and His Overlooked Mudfog Papers
    • Monkey Besynesse: Patronage and Print, or the Ape and the Book
    • Jane Eyre and Masculinity
    • Ghosting, Place, and Wuthering Heights
    • Hideous Repasts: from Varney the Vampyre to Hannibal the Cannibal
    • Airmen, Aeroplanes, and Aesthetics: Pilots in Irish War Poetry
    • ‘Such Terrifying Vistas of Reality’: Lunatic Landscapes in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft
    • Howling From the City Walls: Poetry and Counter-Culture in 1960s Newcastle
  • Late Summer Lecture Series 2012
    • Beauty, the Most Moral of All Values
    • Mirrors of Madness: Emotional Blindness, Narcissistic Doubling and Paranoia in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962)
    • The Changing Face of Collection in Folk Music: A Short Lecture in Ethnomusicology
  • Outrageously Modern! Avant-Garde Magazines that Shocked Britain 1884-1922
    • The Great War in the Magazines
    • The White Review: A Journal for Our Times
  • The Persistence of Beauty: Tennyson to MacNeice
  • The Recovery of Beauty
• Poetry Aloud
  • An Evening with TS Eliot, by Dr Gareth Reeves and Dr Jason Harding
  • Andrew McMillan, ‘Coalfield Dementia’
  • Aurélia Lassaque on Poetry Across Languages
  • Crash and Burn: A Poetry Reading in Memory of Michael O’Neill
  • Gareth Reeves Reads From His Poetry Collection, To Hell with Paradise
  • Helen Mort ‘The Circle’
  • John Clegg and Gareth Reeves Discuss the Challenges of Researching and Writing Poetry
  • John Clegg Reads From His Poetry Collection, Antler
  • Lorna Goodison: Meet the Durham Book Festival Laureate 2012
  • Michael O’Neill Reads from Gangs of Shadow
  • Paul Farley: An Audience with Durham Book Festival’s Poet Laureate 2014
  • Sinéad Morrissey, Collier
  • StAnza Poetry Festival: Interviews and Readings
    • Gillian Allnutt on a Life in Poetry
    • JL Williams on the Origins of Her Poetry
    • Liz Berry’s Locations and Locutions
    • Polly Atkin on the Places of Her Poetry
    • Rachael Boast on the Language and Sound of Poetry
    • Will Harris on Becoming a Poet
  • The Poetry of W.B. Yeats
  • Tom Pickard Reads from his Poetry
• The Uses of Literature
  • An Intellectual Reflects on Brexit
  • Contaminations: Literature and Climate Change
  • How Literature Challenges Our Infatuation with Numbers
  • How Literature Changes the Way We Think About Ageing
  • Why we don’t write poetry about Climate Change
• Literature, History, Culture
  • (Re)searching Lafcadio Hearn
  • A Conversation with Jane Smiley
  • Celebrating the Brontës
  • Margaret Thatcher and Pornography
  • Not World’s Apart: A Conversation on Philosophy and Literature with Michael Mack and Barry Stocker
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley: Love, Hope, and Imagination
  • The Decline of British Fiction
  • The Pleasures and Challenges of Contemporary Literature
  • The Time Machine
  • Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
  • When is Modernism?