NHS research & development departments from across Kent will be hosting a health research event – sponsored by KentHealth –  at Woolf College on Canterbury campus on 13 January 2017.

The Kent-wide Research Day aims  to celebrate health research taking place across Kent. The programme for the day, which runs from 09.00-17.00, includes plenary sessions, presentations and workshops. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

The day is free to attend, but places are limited. To register, please click on this Eventbrite link.

If you have any questions, email r&doffice@medway.nhs.uk

Dr Heide Kunzelmann, Lecturer in German in the Department of Modern Languages, will feature on the BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking at 22.00 on Thursday 5 January 2017, exploring the writing and politics of Karl Kraus (1874-1936).

Free Thinking is a series of interviews, talks, debates, drama and live performance with contributions from leading thinkers, artists, scientists and writers. The episode on Karl Kraus is part of Radio 3’s Breaking Free series of programmes exploring the music and culture in Vienna.

Heide joins presenter Philip Dodd, American author Jonathan Franzen (The Kraus Project, Picador, 2014) and novelist Lawrence Norfolk to discuss Karl Kraus, whose artistic achievements include 700 one man performances of works by Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare and others, plus performances of Offenbach’s operettas, accompanied by piano and singing all the roles himself; whose magazine Die Fackel published Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schanberg, August Strindberg and Oscar Wilde and whose support for other artists included assisting Frank Wedekind in staging his controversial play Pandora’s Box.

In 1915 Kraus began writing a satirical play about World War One called The Last Days of Mankind which mixes dialogue drawn from contemporary documents with fantastical expressionist scenes of apocalypse.

The programme will be available after it has been broadcast on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Did you know that you can now buy Apple Products with educational discounts for personal use?

The University’s Purchasing team have forwarded a special discount offer for Kent staff, from Stone Computers, suppliers of Apple products to Kent.

Stone Computers’ dedicated Staff Portal allows you to buy MacBooks, iPads, iPhones and accessories at exclusive educational rates and are up to 10% cheaper than you’ll find on the High Street.

To take advantage of the Apple Educational discounts, you’ll need to register at www.getyourtech.co.uk. Once registered, you’ll have access to the full range of Apple devices, as well as laptops and tablets from Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo and Samsung.

Researchers at the University have had their study featured on the front cover of the journal Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry.

The current issue of the journal, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, features research by a University team led by Dr Alison Edwards of the Medway School of Pharmacy (MSP) and Dr Simon Holder of the School of Physical Sciences.

The researchers looked at peptide mimic systems and their ability to selectively bind metal ions. They carried out extensive work to characterize this phenomenon, and the resulting paper was entitled Selective complexation of divalent cations by a cyclic α,β-peptoid hexamer: a spectroscopic and computational study.

MSP is run jointly by Kent and the University of Greenwich. The full list of study authors were: E De Santis and A A Edwards (Medway School of Pharmacy, universities of Kent and Greenwich); B D Alexander (University of Greenwich); S J Holder (School of Physical Sciences); A -S Biesse-Martin (Université Clermont Auvergne, Université Blaise Pascal); B V Nielsen (University of Greenwich); D Mistry and L Waters (University of Huddersfield); G Siligardi and R Hussain (Diamond Light Source Ltd);  S Faure (CNRS, France) and C Taillefumier (CNRS, Université Clermont Auvergne, Université Blaise Pascal).

The total amount raised (including the tax refund element) for the homelessness charity Porchlight at the University Carol Service, held on 13 December in Canterbury Cathedral, was £2,425.90.

Thanks to all who contributed, and to the 192 students whose active participation as singers, readers and stewards helped to make the occasion such a success.

Dr Stephen Laird
Chaplaincy

Each year hundreds of students stay on campus over the festive break, away from their families and friends.

To help them feel festive this Christmas, a group of postgraduate students from the Kent Graduate Student Association are organising a day of Christmas fun and food on the Canterbury campus on 25 December, as well as a New Year’s Eve event on 31 December.

These two events are being wholly organised, hosted and led by students in Woolf College and are open to all students on campus to attend. Whilst the students have the food planned, any decorations, Christmas crackers or anything else you or your departments would be happy to lend/donate to make the students Christmas a bit more festive and fun, please email Tom Ritchie.

We are delighted to announce that the annual Internationalisation Forum will be taking place on Wednesday 18 January 2017 in the Darwin Conference Suite from 09.30-12.30. The event will start with refreshments at 09.15.

The purpose of the event is to share details about Internationalisation activity at Kent, and to allow colleagues from across the University to meet and exchange ideas.

All staff are invited to attend. The Programme will be published shortly and you can register your attendance on the Events webpages.

We very much look forward to seeing you at the Forum.

Two members of the Department of Comparative Literature have just been published in the new collection The Cambridge History of the English Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2016), edited by Dominic Head from the University of Nottingham.

Both Dr Axel Stahler, Reader in Comparative Literature, and Dr Paul March-Russell, Specialist Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature, have contributed chapters. The collection is the first comprehensive volume to chart the origins and evolution of the English short story to the present day. Written by international experts in the field, it covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission.

Axel’s chapter, entitled ‘Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans’ focuses on the British Jewish short story in English, which in the past has suffered a surprising lack of recognition.

The chapter by Paul March-Russell is entitled ‘Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace’. Not only does the short story lie at the intersection between high and low culture, between the little magazine and the mass-market periodical, as Tim Armstrong has observed, but so too does science fiction.

For more details, please see the publisher’s website.

Final year students at the University of Kent are formally invited to attend the 2017 Graduation Launch event which will be held at both the Canterbury and Medway campus.

These Graduation Launch events will take place on the 18 January in Medway and 20 January in Canterbury and will cover topics such as:

– What to expect from your graduation

– What you need to do before your graduation

– Recent Kent alumni and where they are now

– Which date and time you will be graduating!

This will be the official release of your graduation date which will not be available until this time, so we highly recommend that you attend!

We look forward to seeing you at the Launch!

Event links:
Medway Graduation Launch 2017
Canterbury Graduation Launch 2017