Postgraduate student scoops interdisciplinary award

English Literature PhD candidate has won the Breaking Boundaries People’s Choice Award.

Zainab Alqublan, from Saudi Arabia, is undertaking her PhD on the poetic and pictorial nineteenth-century Orient thanks to funding from the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education and Shaqra University, under the supervision of Professor of Bibliography Bill Bell and Reader in English Literature Dr Becky Munford.

Her award-winning poster The Poetic and Pictorial East in the Nineteenth-Century Europe featured at this year’s conference in Cardiff on 19 March.

Zainab said: “I found my inspiration in the spectacular Orientalist paintings and illustrations of literary texts scattered in museums across Britain, France, and the Gulf Countries. My project itself deals with those artists, travellers, and poets who chose to disrupt the literary and artistic conventions of their time to provide alternative perspective on the Victorian Orient. By doing so, the study seeks to build a bridge, instead of a wall, between these two cultures.”

Breaking Boundaries is an annual interdisciplinary conference for postgraduate research students in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences within the Great Western 4, the consortium of four research intensive universities in South West England and Wales formed in 2013.

The study of English Literature at the University ranges from undergraduate level including Joint Honours with English Language or Creative Writing to postgraduate research.