St Anne's Academic Review

Sharpen your writing.
Share what inspires you.

RESEARCH PAPERS | CREATIVE WRITING | SPARKS REVIEWS

We warmly welcome submissions to the 11th issue of St Anne's Academic Review. Submissions are open to all Members of St Anne's College. While the deadline for academic abstracts has now passed, we are still accepting submissions for Creative Writing and Spark Reviews until Monday 21st June.

Read our Submission Guidelines

Recently Published

SPARK REVIEW

A Socially-Distanced Romeo and Juliet Ballet at Sadler’s Wells

Andreea Scridon, MSt. in Creative Writing

Rudolf Nureyev is perhaps a name more familiar to an older generation (due to his untimely death from AIDS in 1992) or to ballet connoisseurs exclusively. But the dancer and choreographer, who has recently come back into the spotlight with Ralph Fiennes’ 2018 biopic The White Crow, was one of the world’s most famous ballet dancers a few decades ago. A legend of magnetism and vision, Nureyev repeatedly sparked outrage for always insisting on dancing and interpreting in his own way, often making radical, modernizing changes to classical ballet.

Keep reading

Fresh academic voices –
STAAR x STAMP Podcast Series

New to STAAR this year, a series of conversations with five of our contributors, aiming to demystify some of the world-class research conducted by graduates at St Anne's College, Oxford. We join forces with St Anne's MCR Podcast (STAMP) to give you special insight on a range of topics – from human emotions and genetics, to Medieval French literature and the varieties of Spanish being spoken across the world.

Listen to our episodes

RESEARCH PAPER

How Does a Poem Mean? Modes of Expression in Sonnets from the Portuguese

Gregor Bauer, Faculties of English and Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

How does a poem mean? A formalist approach to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) may provide a partial answer by demonstrating a poetry-specific potential of meaning-creation. To this end, this essay offers new perspectives on Barrett Browning’s playful interventions against a one-dimensional love discourse through poly-dimensional semiotics and explores how her sonnets expand the scope of linguistic expressability by transcending central axiomata of Saussurian structuralism avant la lettre.

Read full paper

SPARK REVIEWS

Sentinels Aloft: An Indifference of Birds Book Review

Vicki Lee, MSt in English Literature

Birds have been concretised as familiar figures in literary tradition and the popular imagination: to name a few, they have been portents of death, icons of freedom, vestiges of idyllic times past. Yet these are appellations humans ascribe to birds, whom carry these manmade ideas on delicate wings.