Past Events

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

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Keith A. Manley (Institute of Historical Research), 'Infidel books and subscription libraries: government censorship in Europe during the Napoleonic period'
Many governments tried to prevent libraries from acquiring politically inflammatory and heretical literature. In Germany secret societies of freemasons infiltrated libraries to promote their own views of Enlightenment and world domination, while Hanover feared for the morals of its children if they were allowed access to circulating libraries. Germany and Austria banned subscription libraries, fearing their malignant influence. In France, officials kept libraries under close surveillance. In comparison, British libraries escaped lightly from tight supervision, though in Ulster several were ransacked by yeomanry.

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Richard Lee, ‘Bringing Back Every Sita’: The 'Recovery of Women Following India’s Partition (1947) in Bapsi Sidhwa’s "Cracking India" and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s "The River Turning" '
Richard Lee is Assistant Principal of Oldham Sixth Form College and a part-time research student in the English Department at the Open University. His research project, entitled "Women and Partition: Indian and Pakistani Novels of the Mid to Late 20th Century" focuses on the role of literature in supplementing or interrupting ‘official’ histories of Partition. He has recently delivered papers at the University of Kent’s Cultural Memory conference (September 2008), at the University of Maynooth’s Ends of Empire conference (June 2009), and at the University of Cardiff’s Partitions and Reunifications conference (July 2009). He has had an article, based on part of his research, published by Quest, the on-line Arts & Humanities journal of Queen’s University, Belfast.

Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Alice Reeve-Tucker (University of Birmingham), 'Lewis, Youth and Infantilism'

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 18:45
Speakers: Dr Michael Michael (Christies’ Education), 'The hermeneutics of style: the Luttrell Psalter and its interpretation'

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Maggie Inchley (Birkbeck, University of London), 'The Politics of the Voice in British Theatre 1997-2007';
Karen Quigley (Kings College, University of London), tbc
Postgraduate Panel.

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00
The group will begin reading episode 6, 'Hades'.

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Lance Pettitt (Leeds Met), 'Who Owns the Memory of Brian Desmond Hurst? The Perils of Editing Memoir'
Examining how autobiography may be used as a resource through which cinema and cultural history might combine. It reflects on two years of editorial research leading to a critical edition of Brian Desmond Hurst’s memoir "Travelling the Road: Memories of a Life in Cinema". The paper takes Hurst’s film "Dangerous Moonlight" (1941) and chapter 7 of his memoir to explain the conception for the scholarly edition, key points in the logistics/legal aspects and the theoretical problems that emerged in editing. The paper draws on insights from Steedman and other theorists of life-writing in dialogue with Richard Dyer’s conception of authorship in film.

Reading: Carol Steedman’s essay ‘History and Autobiography’ (1992) and Richard Dyer’s ‘Believing in Fairies’ (2000 [1991]. As well as referencing this written material, we’ll be considering the significance of two music tracks that feature in Hurst’s Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and analysing sequences from the film. Preview the first clip here; see the next in the seminar.

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Jennifer Rampling (HPS, Cambridge) and Peter Jones (King's College, Cambridge), 'Mediaeval Alchemy'

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Andrew Shail (University of Oxford), 'Literary Temporality from "Jude the Obscure" to "Ulysses" '
Lara Feigel (Kings College, University of London), ‘In the Savage and Austere Light of a Burning World’: British Literature and Cinema in the Second World War'
Chair: Maggie Humm (University of East London)
NB: AFTERNOON START TIME FOR THIS SESSION. NOTE ROOM CHANGE.

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:15 - 19:00
Speakers: Kate Rumbold (Shakespeare Institute), 'Selling Shakespeare: cultural institutions in the twenty-first century'

John Lee (University of Bristol), 'Shakespeare, Jonson and friendship'

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Fatema Mernissi: ‘Introduction’ and ‘A Tradition of Misogyny (1)’ from The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (1987)

Saba Mahmood: ‘The Subject of Freedom’ and ‘Epilogue’ from Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005)

Leila Aboulela: ‘The Ostrich’ from Coloured Lights (2001)

Reading for the session can be downloaded here.

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Paul Arthur, 'History's Digital Future'
Digital history spans disciplines and can take many forms. New modes of publication, new methods for doing research, and new channels of communication are making historical research richer, more relevant and more widely accessible. Many applications of computer based research and publication are natural extensions of the established techniques for researching and writing history. Others are consciously
experimental. Although computer technology started to revolutionize
the discipline of history many decades ago, genres and formats for recording and presenting history using digital media are not well established. Are new technologies and methodologies fundamentally changing how we interpret the past? If so, in what ways?

Dr Paul Arthur (paul.arthur@anu.edu.au) is a Research Fellow at the Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, and an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University. He has held various visiting fellowships, including to the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, USA, the National Museum of Australia (2007), the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University (2006), and through the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2004). In 2004 he was Helen and John S. Best Research Fellow at the American Geographical Society Library and an Associate of the Center for 21st Century Studies, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (USA).

Dr Arthur's research focuses on how new technologies are transforming the way history is recorded and studied. He was drawn to the digital history field after completing a PhD in eighteenth century literary history at The University of Western Australia. Prior to taking up a position at Curtin University he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Murdoch University. He has published widely on digital humanities topics and also on Australian cultural history.

Senate House Library Friends Visit
Seminar
Time: 17:00
Senate House Library Friends Visit. Professor Michael Slater will conduct a tour of the the Charles Dickens Museum, where Dickens lived 1837-39 and wrote "Oliver Twist". Visitors will also see a special exhibition on "A Tale of Two Cities". The Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX.

Charge: £4. Maximum number: 15. Friends members only. If you would like to attend please contact Library Office, Senate House Library, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel. 020 7862 8411.
Click here for other SHL Friends events.

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Harry Gilonis (Independent Scholar), A Chinese Canto

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: PANEL: After "Darwin’s Plots"
Professor David Amigoni (Keele University), ‘Fields of Inheritance: Science, Literature and their Relations after "Darwin's Plots" '

Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge), 'Emotions, Beauty, Consciousness: late Darwin'

Professor Daniel Brown (University of Western Australia), 'Poetry for physicists and mathematicians'

Djuna Barnes Research Seminar cancelled
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Fiction and Autobiography
Lecture
Time: 18:00 - 19:30
Speakers: Hilary Mantel, Fay Weldon. Chair: Robert McCrum
For both Weldon and Mantel autobiography seems to be a form of haunting. Their books are peopled by the life-like dead, and Mantel’s "Beyond Black" explored the life of a medium, who makes no distinction between the living and the dead. Associate Observer books editor Robert McCrum will ask the speakers about the relationship between autobiography and fiction, opening out the discussion to wider questions of what autobiography is/is for, where fiction becomes autobiography, and what the process of locating the self involves. Venue: Anatomy Theatre, King's Building, Strand Campus. CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION.

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