The Rt Hon Alan Milburn – Project Ambassador for ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change. A Corpus Analysis of Five Centuries of Texts’

We are delighted to announce that the Rt Hon Alan Milburn has kindly agreed to become the project ambassador for our project ‘Newspapers, poverty and long-term change. A corpus analysis of five centuries of text’ led by Professor Tony McEnery.

Alan Milburn served as a Labour MP for Darlington between 1992 and 2010 and, throughout that time, was recognised for his strong commitment to combatting social inequality and modernising politics. In January 1998 he was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury and, between 1999 -2003, served as Secretary of State for Health where he led wide-ranging reforms in health and social care services. He went on to serve as Chanceller of the Duchy of Lancaster between 2004-2005.

Alan Milburn chaired the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions from 2008 and 2009 under Prime Minister Brown and was then appointed by Prime Minister Cameron to chair the Commission on Social Mobility and Child Poverty which has a statutory duty to monitor and report on both issues. In this role, he has worked tirelessly to reduce child poverty and challenge Britain’s so-called ‘glass ceiling’ which maintains deep-rooted social inequality. His background, growing up on a council estate in a small town in County Durham, has given him first-hand knowledge of the crippling disadvantage that can be engendered by social deprivation. He has spoken recently of the changing nature of British poverty, arguing that it has become a mainstream issue affecting many working families.

Alan Milburn runs his own consultancy, advising governments and international corporations, and continues to be involved in a number of charitable ventures.

Alan Milburn already has a strong connection with Lancaster. He studied history as an undergraduate at the University and, in 2000, was awarded an honorary degree. In January 2015 he will start a new role as Lancaster University’s Chancellor.

The Rt Hon Alan Milburn’s commitment to our project has stemmed from his lifelong interest in the causes and consequences of poverty. As project ambassador, he will provide expertise and guidance to the project team members at CASS and is very well-placed to share our findings with other interested parties from non-academic backgrounds.

Newby Fellow appointed to CASS

The Department of Linguistics and English Language has recently appointed a Newby Fellow, Dr. Helen Baker, to work on the CASS project entitled ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change. A Corpus Analysis of Five Centuries of Texts’.

Dr. Baker is a social historian who was awarded her Ph.D. in Russian History at the University of Leeds in 2002. Her thesis examined popular reactions to the Khodynka disaster, a stampede which took place during the coronation celebrations of Nicholas II in 1896. She taught Russian and European history at the University of Bradford before working as a teaching assistant in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds between 2003-2007.

Helen Baker has previously worked as a transcriber and historical researcher for the Department of Linguistics and Language, completing a historical chronology of the Scottish Glencairn Uprising of 1653 for the British Academy funded ‘Newsbooks at Lancaster’ project. This research sparked an interest in early modern history and she went on to investigate the lives of seventeenth-century English prostitutes. Her first book, co-authored with CASS Centre Director, Professor Tony McEnery, is forthcoming and uses the study of early-modern prostitution as a case study to illustrate that historians and corpus linguists have much to gain through academic collaboration.

The project ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change’, which is funded by the Newby Trust, aims to assemble the largest ever corpora of newspapers and related material from 1473 to 1900 and use this to investigate changing discourses on poverty across this period. Dr. Baker will officially join the project on 1 July 2014, working with Professor Tony McEnery, Dr. Andrew Hardie, and Professor Ian Gregory.

The appointment will mean something of a home-coming for Helen Baker, who studied for her undergraduate degree in the History Department at Lancaster University between 1994-1997.

The Rt Hon Alan Milburn becomes Project Ambassador for the CASS project ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change. A Corpus Analysis of Five Centuries of Texts’

We are delighted to announce that the Rt Hon Alan Milburn has kindly agreed to become the project ambassador for our project ‘Newspapers, poverty and long-term change. A corpus analysis of five centuries of text’. He will provide guidance and share his expertise with members of the CASS team who are working on the project which is funded by the Newby Trust and led by Professor Tony McEnery.

Alan Milburn served as a Labour MP for Darlington between 1992 and 2010. During this period, he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury (1998-1999); Secretary of State for Health (1999-2004); and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (2004-2005). Under the present government he has been appointed to chair the Commission on Social Mobility and Child Poverty which has a statutory duty to monitor and report on developments in both areas.

Alan Milburn’s commitment to our project has stemmed from his lifelong interest in the causes and consequences of poverty: “I am happy to support this worthwhile and fascinating project that will investigate changing attitudes to poverty throughout five hundred years of our history. By finding out how poverty is conceived, we are better equipped to eradicate it.” We wholeheartedly welcome Alan Milburn as our project ambassador and look forward to sharing our research with him as it progresses.

Introducing CASS PhD student Amelia Joulain-Jay

joulainI am Amelia Joulain-Jay and I have just started some corpus-based doctoral research on the representation of places in nineteenth-century British newspapers. I grew up in Belgium, the daughter of an American mother and a French father, and this multi-lingual and multi-cultural environment fed my curiosity about the way people interact and communicate. After some post-secondary school volunteer work in India, Ecuador and Spain, I started studies in the Dalcroze pedagogy of music in Brussels before realizing I wanted to go to university.

My desire to unpick the relationship between language and society brought me to Lancaster University to study sociolinguistics and sociology. Once there, I discovered Corpus Linguistics and was impressed by its ability to handle volumes of textual evidence. The opportunity to further develop my skills in Corpus Linguistics by undertaking PhD research under the supervision of Andrew Hardie and Ian Gregory was too exciting to overlook, and I am delighted to be working surrounded by researchers in the CASS centre.

My research project is part of the ERC-funded Spatial Humanities project which aims to develop ways of analysing text using the affordances of Geographical Information Systems to benefit fields in the Humanities. The research for my PhD will be the first large-scale application of a method combining Corpus Linguistics and Geographical Information Systems to uncover spatial patterns in a large quantity of text. The material under study will come from the British Library’s recently digitized archive of nineteenth-century newspapers; hence the research is expected to make a valuable contribution to the field of nineteenth-century history.

Extra-academic facts about me you may find interesting: I am Baha’i; this year is the second year that I am one of the Lancaster University Music Society Choir’s conductors; my husband and I have recently set up a jazz band in which I sing.

New CASS Briefing: Representations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009


CASSbriefings-islamRepresentations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009
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 Is the British press Islamophobic? How are Islam and Muslims typically written about? Have representations of Islam and Muslims changed over time, particularly since 9/11? Are some newspapers less ‘friendly’ towards Muslims than others? Read this CASS: Briefing of a large-scale corpus-based discourse analytical study to discover more.


New resources will be added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.