English at Leeds Trinity Podcast

We’re back! And in this episode we’re indulging our love of history by thinking about kings. Especially medieval kings as represented in English literature - and not just the best-known ones but some who are often overlooked. Hannah, Edwin, Richard and Oz each introduce one king they find particularly interesting. We think about why Ethelred II is known as ‘the Unready’; why He...

Hannah came up with the concept for this episode, which is all about made-up words in literature. We start by reading Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, ‘Jabberwocky’; then look at a little-known passage from Shakespeare where the characters all deliberately speak meaningless words. We think a bit about how writers such as Frank Herbert, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling have invented words to enri...

In this episode Richard is joined by students Hannah, Ben, Humaira, Saarah and Imi, who each choose one word beginning with the letter I for us to talk about. There is plenty of variety – from ‘Istanbul’ to ‘ideology’ via ‘if’ and ‘ick’ - and on the way we think about the difference between ‘incredulous’ and ‘incredible’; and also what ‘identity’ means. We end by listening to a student readin...

We’re all interested in where English words came from and how the language evolved. But how can we do some research of our own into this?  In this episode Richard, Ben and Hannah are joined by Dr Will Standing, who talks us through some of the digital resources which are freely available for researching the history of a language, including Google Ngrams, British National Corpus, and...

An episode focussed on everyone’s favourite accent. Richard and Ben are joined by proud Geordies Lucy and Rod, who share their love of stottie cakes, pease pudding, and the wonders of the word ‘canny’, and give us some insights into the distinctive features of Geordie pronunciation. We also think about Geordie celebrities and the modern phenomenon of ‘Geordie stylisation’, and consider h...

In this episode, recorded in 2024, Richard is joined by Ben, Hannah, Imi and Basil to compare notes on Shakespeare, and how we can access Shakespeare through the 1623 First Folio, the all-important book in which all Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together. We share our experiences of studying Shakespeare, and see how many of Shakespeare’s plays we can list; and we celebrate the new fr...

This is a special episode recorded with an audience of Leeds Trinity staff and students as part of our English Week in 2023. Martyn Bedford, who is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity, talks about his career as a novelist and answers questions from the audience about two memorable extracts from his novels (read by Lana and Motiba): the 'Birdmen' scene from The Island of Lost Souls (200...

Continuing our exploration of the languages of Eurovision, Richard Yvonne and Linda celebrate the victory of Switzerland in Eurovision 2024 by hearing more from Linda about the four official languages of Switzerland and how they are used. Richard and Yvonne compare notes on some of the other interesting languages that featured alongside English in the contest; Yvonne and Linda take a quiz on...

English at Leeds Trinity is who we are, but we are always interested in other languages beside English. In this episode Richard, Yvonne, Eloise and Maia celebrate the multilingualism of the Eurovision song contest, with a particular focus on two other languages beginning with E. We hear from Maia about her first language, Eesti Keel (Estonian); and from Yvonne about hers, Español (Spanis...

Join Richard, Eloise and Ben in this episode for an exploration of the ever-popular topic of dialect. We test Eloise on her knowledge of Salford dialect; revisit the question of whether there is more than one way to pronounce the word ‘apricot’; examine what Yorkshire dialect looked like in 1683; and see if we can guess the meaning of some Leeds dialect words from 1862.  Note : we origin...

In Part 2 of our C is for . . . Creative Writing episode, Amina, Oz and Lucy talk about what it is like to teach and study creative writing at university; and we then all share in reading and discussing a piece of creative writing which was recently produced for a unique occasion: poet laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘An Unexpected Guest’ which was written to mark the coronation of King Charles III...

Creative Writing is a big deal at Leeds Trinity.  In Part 1 of our C is for . . . Creative Writing episode, Amina, Oz and Lucy join Richard and Yvonne to talk about creative writing; what it means to them and how they got into it; and each read a short piece that they have recently written.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eloise, Yvonne and Ruqaiya join Richard to talk about favourite books, words for ‘book’, and one book in particular that we have enjoyed reading recently, R.F. Kuang’s Babel , a novel that does amazing things with ideas about translation and what gets lost in translation. We end by dipping into our knowledge of other languages to come up with some suggestions of our own for untranslatable wor...

In this episode, Richard is joined by Brogan and Hannah for an excursion into Old English. We use some of the online dictionaries available to research the Old English equivalents of modern words; have a go at solving an Anglo-Saxon riddle from the Exeter Book; and read the famous poem 'Wulf and Eadwacer' - in the original and in a translation made by Leeds Trinity students. Hosted on Acast. See a...

In this episode Richard, Yvonne and Eloise think about a selection of words beginning with A, compare accents, talk about Jane Austen, and read an American poem.     English at Leeds Trinity is a podcast made by staff and students studying English in the School of Digital and Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...