Welcome to Eclectica!

Professional Editing Service

I have recently decided to offer an editing service to those who would like their papers, theses or other written work (in English) proofread or corrected. If you would like to find out more, please see my Editing page for details on rates and my experience. If you have any requests or would like more information, just get in touch.

The Zurich English Student (ZEST)

In summer 2011, I decided to set up a student-run online newspaper for the English students at the University of Zurich, to give them another outlet to practice their writing skills and to provide the student body with something entertaining and hopefully thought-provoking to read, too!

The paper is now going strong, but if you are interested in contributing it would be great to hear from you. See the blog here. You can also keep up to date by joining our facebook page or following us on twitter!

Battlestar Galactica: Cylons and humanity

For my Popular Culture module I got to choose my essay topic -- so naturally I turned to Battlestar Galactica, my favourite TV show of all time... (yes, I am a geek *holds hands up*). I remember thinking 'Oh God, it's going to be another Star Trek, isn't it? But this is not your typical sci-fi show. Yes, it's got spaceships, gunfights, FTL jumps, and some amazing visuals/special effects (seriously impressive stuff on a TV budget - it would work equally well on a big screen), but it's also concerned with philosophy, politics, religion, ethics, humanity - it's not the kind of show where you encounter a new alien species and have to blow them up every week. No amount of praise from me will make the anti-sci-fi crowd suck in their prejudices and check it out I guess, but I'm still going to say it: go and watch this show! You won't be disappointed. Read more.

Thanks to all who filled in the Language Contact Survey

Thank you to everyone who participated in my survey, it was very interesting reading through and analysing the responses: I have now completed my research paper, which if you care to read it, can be found here. (Please have patience with the - rather large - pdf file, the Appendices are to blame!)

Post modern wrestling with reality

OK, so last term I had the good fortune to take part in Martin Heusser's Alternate Worlds seminar, which as soon as I saw the title, I knew I had to do! I have spent most of my teenage life reading about Alternate Worlds, after all...(Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Terry Brooks' Shannara and Running with the Demon series, almost all of David Eddings' books, Anne McCaffrey's Pern, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials...to name a few).

Starting with More's Utopia and working through to the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix, via texts like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (which I've always meant to read but never got around to before), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Alice in Wonderland and several others that took us to alternate realities, I eventually ended up writing a paper on Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Read more...

Kiss me I’m Irish-ish: Identity and Language

I have always had a bit of trouble defining myself. The cut glass ‘generic Southern’ (as my husband terms it) accent betrays my inherent sense of my Irishness...as does the fact that I was born and raised in Watford, outside London: how very English, I hear you say. And yet...

What gives us our identity? A mixture, surely, of genes and environment. I like to think that my genetic makeup is Irish – a gift from my parents, who left the country where they were born when they got married and are no doubt aware of the pitfalls of ‘national’ identity, having grown up in a Troubled Northern Ireland. My environment, on the other hand, was quintessentially English; I grew up outside London, was privileged in my education in Watford and later in Cambridge, and that is what is projected when I speak – never did I feel this so keenly as when I walked the streets of Belfast as a solitary teen, visiting family in the summer holidays, hugely self-conscious and aware that if I opened my mouth I would be instantly identifiable as something ‘Other’. Read more...

Philip Pullman: senses and sensibility?

Watch Philip Pullman speaking about the series

I’ve just finished reading His Dark Materials for the...nth time (I forget) – it’s been a favourite since my mum bought the first of Pullman’s trilogy for me for Christmas. I was 11 when I first read Northern Lights, so I felt as though my own reading experience was aligned with Lyra’s self-discovery. I had to wait until I was well into my late teens for the dénouement of the series, a fact that plagued me greatly: every spring and autumn I would go to the information desk of Waterstones to ask about the third book’s status.

Now when I re-read the trilogy, I am looking at it through the eyes of an adult who has lived through the “Cambridge experience” - all right, it’s the Other Place that is depicted in the book, but my wide eyed be-gowned eighteen year old self that walked through the Main Court and entered the Hall for matriculation dinner (complete with glasses to flick gently with a fingernail) was not so very far from Lyra, with her powerful curiosity (and not a little awe) that spurs her very first exploration in the opening chapter. Read more...