Radio
Please find here my radio and podcast appearances. I'm always keen to contribute to radio and podcast productions - please contact me on joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk if you would like to work together.
A Roman road which winds up through central Wales forms the spine of the latest book by Tom Bullough. He joins poet Zoë Skoulding in a conversation with Joan Passey about how the Welsh landscape has fed into their writing. Tom Bullough spent his early years on a hill farm in Radnorshire and his books include the novel Addlands. Zoë Skoulding is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. She lives in Porthaethwy/Menai Bridge and her latest poetry collection is called Marginal Sea.
Premiered to 63 people at the Royal Court back in 1973, the Rocky Horror Show is marking its anniversary with a production touring the UK. New Generation Thinkers Louise Creechan and Joan Passey explore its links with Frankenstein and the gothic tradition, and Paul Baker discusses its place in a history of camp. Shahidha Bari presents.
"Not so much a fear of going out as a fear of something dreadful happening whilst being out" - writer Graham Caveney talks to Matthew Sweet about his own experience of agoraphobia and also how the condition has been reflected in the work of other writers, including Shirley Jackson and Emily Dickinson. Writer Kate Summerscale and New Generation Thinker Joan Passey trace the shifting ideas about sources of phobias in the 19th century and the explosion of interest in naming and cataloguing them. Film critic Christina Newland explores Alfred Hitchcock's portrayal of phobias in films including Frenzy and Marnie.
From the Pirates of Penzance and Captain Hook, to Ottoman corsairs, Henry Avery, Mary Read and Lady Killigrew: Anne McElvoy is joined by New Generation Thinkers Michael Talbot and Joan Passey, and by Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History, Royal Museums Greenwich, who is also one of the co-curators of Pirates at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.
The noisy Victorian world annoyed the mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage, who came up with the idea of a programmable computer. He wrote letters complaining about it and a pamphlet which explored ideas about whether the sea could record its own sound, had a memory and could broadcast sound. New Generation Thinker Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, sets these ideas alongside the work done by engineers cabling the sea-bed to allow communication via telegraph and Rudyard Kipling's images of these "sea monsters."
20:35 Interval 2:
Kate Molleson talks to Joan Passey, an expert on the cultural and literary histories of seascapes and coasts, about the Cornish context of tonight’s opera.
Varney the Vampire was a blood-soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a large volume when it was finally published in book form. In spite of his comfort with crosses, daylight and garlic, Varney's capacity to reflect on his actions made him an early model for Dracula. Matthew Sweet explores why a work, so often overlooked, was so important to the development of the vampire genre.
Smugglers, refugees, trade and melting ice and polar exploration are part of the conversation as Rana Mitter is joined in the BBC tent at the Hay Festival by Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books have drawn on his birthplace Zanzibar and the refugees arriving at the Kent coast; climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh, who worked at the British Antarctic Survey; and Joan Passey, author of Cornish Gothic, a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.
​New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. There's a playlist featuring insights from the 120.
20:35 Interval 2:Bait depicted Cornish second-home owners in a tense relationship with local fishermen. The 2019 film's director Mark Jenkin is one of Laurence Scott's guests along with author Wyl Menmuir, and Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, where she is researching ideas about the sea as a monstrous space. Their conversation ranges from The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker via Wyl's novel The Many, centred on a derelict home in a coastal village and ideas about outsiders, to Celtic Cornish Breton connections.