Past Events

Please note: For events from 1999 to September 2005 you will need to view our Events Archive.

Methods and Resources
Research Training
Time: 10:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Wim Van Mierlo (Institute of English Studies)
"Going to the Sources: Heuristic Methods and Bibliographical Resources"

These study days are designed to introduce students to a range of topics relevant to postgraduate research - from discovering resources and choosing a dissertation topic to considering doing a PhD and more. In addition to being a forum for discussing research issues, the study days will help to put postgraduates in touch with others throughout the University who may have similar interests and concerns. In other words, it is a very good place to meet people.

Enquiries: [mailto: wim.van-mierlo@sas.ac.uk | Dr Wim Van Mierlo], Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, Senate House, Malet Street; London WC1E 7HU, Tel: 020 7862

Modernism Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: William Rowe (Birkbeck), Colin MacCabe (University of Pittsburgh and Birkbeck), Robert Hampson (Royal Holloway)
'Late Modernism'

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Johannes Machielsen (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Professor Alistair Black (Leeds Metropolitan University) and Professor Simon Pepper (University of Liverpool): 'Buildings, books, and social engineering: the architecture of early public library buildings in Britain'

Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Maria Ollivere
'Paleface'

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Michael Kindellan (University of Sussex)
Canto 36

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck College)
'Language, Neurology and the Subject of Modernity'

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Martin Mueller (Northwestern), 'The Importance of Not-Reading'
A century ago the German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a poem about text-condensing spectacles. Referring to itself as an example of the power of those spectacles, the poem declares that read through them it would be unreadable because thirty-three instances of it would only add up to one question mark. This is a witty turn in the age-old history of "not-reading," about which Pierre Bayard has written an entertaining book and to which Franco Moretti's "distant reading" has made an important theoretical contribution.

If you think of Morgenstern's spectacles as a whimsical prophecy of the retrieval, aggregation, or condensation of information in a digital age, what difference can or should these digital spectacles make to the "art of reading"--a quaint phrase in today's world, but perhaps still subject to Chaucer's lament "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne"? Are they tools that help us see more clearly and read more quickly or should we use them to see differently? Father Busa drew a sharp distinction between ancillary and transformative uses. It is an attractive distinction, but does it stand up to close examination?
Martin Mueller?s primary research field has been the uses of ancient epic and tragedy by European writers since the Renaissance. He has also written on Homer and Shakespeare. More recently he has become interested in the uses of information technology for traditional philological inquiries. Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he is the editor of The Chicago Homer, a multilingual web site that uses the search and display capabilities of digital media to make distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. He is the general editor of WordHoard, an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts, and one of the editors of the MONK Project, a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Mpalive Msiska (Birkbeck College), Saeed Reza Talajooy (University College London), Osita Okagbue (Goldsmith's College), Yvette Hutchison (University of Warwick)
Contemporary African Theatre

Irish Studies Research Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: William McCormack (Worth Library, Dublin), '"We Irish": Yeats, Joseph Hone, and George Berkeley's "Mob"'

London Nineteenth Century Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Paul Young (Exeter University), '"To mathematically jump from trains into steamships and from steamships on to trains": 'Around the World in Eighty Days' and the Making of the Modern World';
Gregory Dart (University College London), 'Charles Lamb and the Alchemy of the Streets'
For Greg Dart's paper, please try to read Lamb's "The Londoner" and "The Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis" in advance (both available on the web).

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Senate House Library Friends AGM
Lecture
Time: 14:00 - 17:30
Speakers: Eitan Karol
Annual General Meeting, followed by a lecture by Eitan Karol, the author of "Charles Holden: Architect" (Shaun Tyas, 2007):
"'Naked and Unashamed" - Charles Holden in Bloomsbury'

If you would like to attend please contact Library Office, Senate House Library, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; Tel: 020 7862 8432. Click here for other SHL Friends events.

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Rene Weis (UCL), 'Editing Romeo and Juliet';
Bart van Es (St Catherine's, Oxford), '"OEIohannes fac totum": What did Shakespeare do before 1594?'

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: John McLeod (University of Leeds), 'Troubled Times: J.G. Farrell writing Ireland'
John McLeod is Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, and author of "Beginning Postcolonialism" (2000), "Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis" (2004), "The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies" (2007), and "J.G. Farrell" (2007).

Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life Post-Graduate Forum
Seminar
Time: 17:45 - 19:45
Speakers: We will focus on Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920). We may also refer back to Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' (1921), which we began to discuss last time. Freud's work is available in the Standard Edition or in the Penguin Freud, or via Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing at Birkbeck, QM and various other libraries. Benjamin's essay is available in various collections including his 'One-Way Street'. It can also be found online here.

Our theme this year is 'On Violence'. The Forum was established by Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary) and Daniel Pick (Birkbeck) as an open-ended series of discussions. It is intended as a reading and discussion group open to any interested postgraduate or recent post-doctoral researchers in any faculty, from colleges and universities across and beyond London. It is not usually open to members of staff.

Given space constraints, please e-mail [mailto: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk | Jon Millington] in advance to reserve your place.

Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar cancelled
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Amy Flanders (Institute of English Studies), 'Sharing the World: how British and American publishers negotiated the international Anglophone book trade, 1940-1960'
Amy Flanders studied history at the University of California, Berkeley, and book history at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, before completing a doctorate at Oxford, where her thesis examined the British publishing industry during the Second World War. In 2004 she was awarded the National Historical Publications and Records Commission Fellowship in Historical Documentary Editing, in which capacity she worked with the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University; The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Volume 2: Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939, was published last year by the University of Illinois Press. Dr Flanders now holds a postdoctoral fellowship with the History of the Oxford University Press project at the Institute of English Studies.

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: READING GROUP: Aristophanes' speech in Plato's "Symposium" (189c-193d), in any modern edition.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Simon Horobin (Magdalen College, Oxford), 'Book Production at Clare Priory in the Fifteenth Century'

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Maggie Inchley (Birkbeck College), Kate Graham (Birkbeck College): Postgraduate Panel

Cult and Commerce of Jane Austen
Conference / Symposium
Time: 00:00
Speakers: include Janet Todd (Chair), Deirdre Le Faye, Tom Sperlinger, William Baker, Kathryn Sutherland
CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Dr Keith Manley (Institute of Historical Research), 'Love, blood, and teddy bears: twopenny libraries, parliament, and the law of retail trade in the 1930s'
{NB: No teddy bears will be harmed during the course of this lecture.}

Literary London Seminar cancelled
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: tba
tba

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS) cancelled
Seminar
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Speakers: Elisabeth Dutton (Worcester College, Oxford), 'Aspects of Medieval Dramaturgy'

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Ana Parejo-Vadillo (Exeter University), 'European Mobilities'; Adrian S. Wisnicki (Birkbeck College), 'Networks, Knowledge, and the "Other" Narratives of Empire'