Diane (left) and David (right) with Sophie Parkes-Niel, the newest member of our team and the successful recipient of a C3RI funded PHD studentship in “Folklore, Contemporary Legend and Media” here at Sheffield Hallam University.

Sophie will begin work on her PHD “Writing the ‘Imagined Village’: a practice-led enquiry into folklore and fiction” in October.

“This practice-led creative writing PhD project seeks to place a folkloric practice, a calendar custom, at the centre of a novel to discover its effectiveness as a narrative device and interrogate the themes it brings into play.”