Yifan Zhai is a young critic from Beijing. She is currently pursuing an MA in English Literature in Beihang University, China. She used to be in an exchange program to the St.Mary’s University of Texas, USA, where she developed an interest in studying and criticizing literature. Her focus is reading the classics with new…
Category: Essays
The Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: A Hero over the Regal Complacency – Freya Zhang
Freya Zhang is a young critic from Shanghai. She is currently based in London, pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature in King’s College London. After being awarded a scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund organized by China Scholarship Council in 2017, she pursued her further study in University College Cork for a semester, where she…
Whiplash: A Queer Theory Investigation Of Jazz Music – Rhi Storer
Rhi Storer is a politics graduate from the University of Birmingham, and an aspiring digital data journalist. Her academic interests include the intersection of cultural theory and data for a new radical journalism, musicology, and critical theory. She tweets @rhistorerwrites Outside of academia, she enjoys jazz, painting, poetry, and rock climbing. Don’t forget the…
Women on the Ward: Implications of Confinement and Collective Identity in Selima Hill’s Lou-Lou – Imogen Shaw
Imogen Shaw is an environmental lobbyist and final year Creative Writing MA student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including The Mays and Blueprint magazine. She is passionate about social advocacy and lives in a London flat with her fiancée and a tenacious family of mice. You can follow…
COMFORT FOODS // Pasul – Nora Selmani
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Comfort Foods! In the academic arena, Food Studies is an incredibly rich interdisciplinary field which looks to delineate much of the things we’d like to discuss here – predominantly, the relationship between food and culture – while grounding food in its social, political and even scientific context….
Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time – Malcolm St Hill
Image: A Star Shell – Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1916 Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle, Australia and is a poet, reviewer and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly the work of Australian soldier-poets. Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time The Australian poet and…
Where I Lived – Robert Boucheron
Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, NY. He has worked as an architect in New York City and Charlottesville, VA. His short stories and essays appear in Bangalore Review, Fiction International, The Fiction Pool, Litro, London Journal of Fiction, New Haven Review, Short Fiction. Where I Lived As the Great Recession brought construction to a standstill…
The Chore of the Text – Robert Boucheron
This essay by Robert Boucheron is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, New York. He has worked as an architect in New York City and since 1987 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His short stories and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Fiction International, London Journal…
What does feminist dating look like? — Jennifer Maidment
Jennifer Maidment is an intersectional feminist who’s very active within her local community and also very single, so figured she’d would write about her experience/struggles. She’s an aspiring writer and is currently on leave from studying international law as an undergraduate at University of Birmingham. What does feminist dating look like? Meet Jennifer, a Gemini,…
To what extent do experiences of conception and/or infertility challenge mind/body dualism? – Frances Tuoriniemi
Image: Keith Haring – Fertility, 1983 Frances Tuoriniemi is a final year English and Creative Writing undergraduate student at the University of Birmingham, who will be continuing on to study an MA in Writing at Warwick next year. They particularly enjoy work that plays with color and feels alive, work that moves and shifts to…
Lady in the streets, freak in the sheets: challenging the virgin/whore dichotomy on ITV2’s Love Island
Milly Morris likes Foucault and feminism. She is currently chasing a PhD in political science at the University of Birmingham. She is a runner, as well as a lover of chickpeas and Game of Thrones. This essay was originally published on her website during the 2017 season of Love Island. Featured image: Clem Onojeghuo at Unsplash A foreword…
The Haunted Present: Using the Past as an Emotional Context – Kat Hausler
Photo by Daniel Wander on Pexels Kat Hausler is a graduate of New York University and Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the recipient of a Baumeister Fellowship. Her debut novel Retrograde was recently published by Meerkat Press. She writes and translates in Berlin. The Haunted Present: Using the Past as an Emotional Context In James…
Porridge 