Current Students

Jake Morris-Campbell

I am writing my first book-length collection of poetry about what it means to come from and identify with the North-East of England. Focusing on South Tyneside, where I grew up and currently live, my poems interrogate landscape, memory, family connections, history, politics, class, sport and literary forebears. Arguing for what John Kinsella calls ‘polyvalent belonging’, my collection – whose working title is Errata Slip for a Northern Town – suggests a dynamic approach to regionalism: one which chimes with the notion that we are always becoming local; that our regional affiliations are contingent upon altering global networks, and vice-versa. Alongside my poems, I include a corresponding critical study of North-East poets, making a case for International Regionalism as an advantageous way of framing identity and belonging in the area. During the PhD, poems from the project have been published in Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England (Bloodaxe, 2017) and have featured in exhibitions at Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Park in Northumberland and at various venues in Tyne and Wear as part of the Heritage Lottery-Funded Stringing Bedes project.

https://jakecampbell1988.blogspot.com/

Supervisory Team: Prof. Bill Herbert, English Literature, Language and Linguistics (Newcastle), Dr Anne Whitehead, English Literature, Language and Linguistics (Newcastle), Dr Paul Batchelor, English Studies (Durham).

Start Date: September 2015.