Jung Soo Jo Title: Between Sacred and Secular: Catholicism and society in South Korea
Jung Soo Jo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leeds based at Leeds Trinity University. He received a M.A. in Korean Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands. His main research interests are sociology of religion, Korean Christianity, modern East Asian history, and World Christianity. For his doctoral dissertation, Jung Soo researches the place of Catholicism in the social change of South Korea since 1945.
Katie Lister
Title: Ladies across the lake: Athurian women writers in England and America.
My principle research interests lie in the field of nineteenth-century medievalism, with particular focus on women writers and their interpretations and appropriations of the medieval. My PhD constructed a critical model with which to interrogate early nineteenth-century female contributions to our modern Arthurian canon. I aim to show that current theories that assert female authorship is written in reaction to authoritative male texts, inadvertently marginalises female contribution. My research demonstrates a more nuanced approach which is required if we are to understand how women authors contributed to our modern Arthurian canon formation.
Helen Kingstone
Title: Histories of modernity: Victorian negotiations with the recent past, c.1840-1899.
My PhD project examines Victorian attempts to write contemporary history. Most Victorian national histories of Britain tended to avoid making judgements about events that had taken place in the nineteenth century, fearing they lacked sufficient hindsight to offer a definitive assessment. By contrast, this recent past is a repeated pre-occupation of the period's fiction, and a disproportionate number of Victorian novels are set back in time by 30 or 40 years into precisely this pre-Victorian era. My thesis deals with both novels and historiography, to consider the divergent responses of these two genres to the challenges of writing about the time period within living memory. In its final chapter, I look at fin-de-siecle utopian writing, which sought to solve these problems by relocating their narratives into a future that offered an artificial hindsight on the nineteenth century.