From the Old Brewery - PGR Podcast

About this episode
Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture, and Isabella Engberg, second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature, invite Ines Kirschner, a PhD student at the School whose research explores nature and wildlife conservation in twenty-first-century fiction.

About Ines Kirschner
Ines holds a PGDE in English and History from Karl-Franzens-University Graz, Austria (2015), as well as an MLitt in English Literary Studies from the University of Aberdeen (2018). She has worked as a modern foreign language assistant and teacher in Austria, Spain, and the UK. Ines started her PhD in 2019 and is a recipient of the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture’s New Kings studentship. Her PhD project explores nature and wildlife conservation in twenty-first-century women’s fiction, with a particular focus on multispecies projects of world-making. In 2020, she organised an event on storytelling and urban ecology for children and families as part of, and co-funded by, Explorathon and Being Human, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. She is a teaching assistant on EL1009 Acts of Reading and was recently selected to act as a UoA observer at COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference.

About this episode
Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, and Ian Grosz, second-year PhD student in Creative Writing invite Libertad Ansola-Palazuelos, a PhD student at the School who researches Spanish literature in the context of Francoist Span from a gender perspective.

About Libertad Ansola Palazuelos
Libertad Ansola Palazuelos is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. In 2018 she graduated from MLitt Creative Writing by the same university and has an English Language and Literature degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She writes short fiction both in English and Spanish, and in the past years she has contributed with her work to several British and Spanish literary magazines such as Leñalmono, Crack the Spine and Sawney magazine. She is originally from Cantabria, a small region in the north of Spain. Her cultural background has deeply influenced her fiction. Her work deals with the unspoken by means of fragmentary and elusive narratives. She believes that family and human relationships are at the core of who we are and enjoys writing that attempts to show how crazy and senseless life can be. When she’s not writing a new story or working on a chapter of her thesis, she teaches English and Creative Writing to children and adults in Spain.

About this episode
Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, and Ian Grosz, second-year PhD student in Creative Writing invite Sarinah O’Donoghue, a PhD student at the School who is exploring narrative representations of autism.

About Sarinah O'Donoghue
My name is Sarinah O’Donoghue, and I am a second year PhD researcher, exploring narrative representations of autism. I graduated from the University of Aberdeen with a first class honours in English Literature in 2020, and later that year, I began my PhD with supervision from Professor Timothy Baker (School of English) and Dr Jacqueline Ravet (School of Education). My passion for championing neurodiversity led me to co-found the Narratives of Neurodiversity Network – a vibrant online community of neurodivergent-led academics and creatives – in July 2020. I have also been creating and producing videos on autism acceptance for the BBC Social channel since June 2019. When not writing, reading, or campaigning, I can be found spending time with my dog, cat, guinea pigs, and gerbils, or talking to frogs in my wildlife pond.

About this episode
Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, invites Marianne Fossaluzza, a PhD student at the School, undertaking research about the photographic collection of Edward Atkinson Hornel in the care of the National Trust for Scotland.

About Marianne Fossaluzza
After a childhood spent obsessing over dinosaurs, then archaeology, then art in general, I decided that my calling was to one day work in the fantastic world of museums and heritage. To that end, I joined the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, France, where I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in art history and iconography in 2014, and my Master’s degree in Museum studies and Museology in 2016, after a year of Erasmus spent at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. 

It is after moving to Scotland that I managed to fully delve in the heritage world by joining the National Trust for Scotland in 2017, as part of the nation-wide Reveal Inventory Project. For two years, I roamed Angus and Aberdeenshire as I helped catalogue the collections of the Trust’s North-East properties. When, at the end of the project, the opportunity arose to enrol in a PhD researching the photographic collection of Edward Atkinson Hornel in the Trust’s care, I jumped on the occasion. Since then, I have been working on the artist at the University of Aberdeen during the week, and welcoming visitors in Drum Castle during the weekend. 

Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, invites two Postgraduate Research Student Representatives, Matthew Lee and Samuel Weaver to discuss the life of a PGR student at the School.