Niamh Downing

I'm Head of English & Writing, leading a team of over 25 lecturers and senior lecturers, associate professor, and associate lecturing staff to deliver an excellent student experience across Falmouth's undergraduate and postgraduate portfolio in English, Creative Writing, Professional Writing and Writing for Script & Screen. I manage our Writers in Residence programme, co-lead the Nick Darke Award with Terrie Fender, Director of the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, and lead on external industry partnerships such as our collaboration with National Trust Publishing. I am currently academic representative on Academic Board, since October 2016.

Prior to joining Falmouth in 2012, I taught on the English programme at University of Exeter, worked in heritage education for several years, and lectured ICT in FE. I completed my doctoral research at University of Exeter in 2013. My thesis examines models of excavation in contemporary poetry, specifically in the work of Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk, and Alice Oswald.

My research is in contemporary literature and its intersection with discourses of place, space, landscape, and ecology. I am Principal Investigator for Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time an AHRC Science in Culture project that investigates deep time and its relationship to landscape change. I'm also an external advisor to AHRC follow-on funded project Hacking the Bees which runs from February 2017 to January 2018. Between March 2015 and September 2016, I was co-Investigator on the AHRC Connected Communities project Telling the Bees.

In 2014 I was awarded internal funding to run the Cosmographies Conference, supported by the British Interplanetary Society, which brought together scholars in the arts, humanities and space science from around the globe, to explore the outer space as a rich source of cultural production. I also co-organised the Haunted Landscapes symposium in association with ASLE-UKI, with Dr Ruth Heholt, which led to the publication of an edited collection, Haunted Landscapes with Rowman and Littlefield.

My pedagogic research has focused on innovation in teaching and learning. In 2013-2014 I worked with learning technologists and a doctoral student at Falmouth University on a project that examined the effectiveness of virtual field trips for teaching and learning in the field of Creative Writing and English. In 2011, I was awarded a Learning and Teaching Enhancement Grant to investigate the value of using archives to enhance teaching and learning in the field of creative writing. The outputs of the project, Out of the Box, include conference papers, articles and a blog.