St Anne's Academic Review

Fresh Academic Voices –
new podcast series

New to STAAR this year: a series of conversations with five of the academic writers in Volume 11, 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

Volume 10 | October 2020

Academic articles on climate change harm, the NHS, Portuguese poetry and more in the latest volume of STAAR.

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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.

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Browse the STAAR Archives

Volume 11 forthcoming

RESEARCH PAPERS | CREATIVE WRITING | SPARK REVIEWS

Volume 11 is due for publication in Michaelmas 2021. We look forward to sharing the pieces with you in due course! Watch our promotional film to learn about about what journal has been working on this year.

Recently Published

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.

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SPARK REVIEW

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.