Past Events

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

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Reading will resume with Hades, line 28.

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Sophie Weeks, Cesare Pastorino and Kathryn Murphy, 'New perspectives on Francis Bacon'

Djuna Barnes Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Julie Taylor (University of York), 'An object of pleasure like the others: "Ladies Almanack" and Happiness'. Chair: Joanne Winning (Birkbeck).
We will be reading "Ladies Almanack" (1928). If possible please bring the 2006 Carcanet edition.

Abstract: I argue that Djuna Barnes’s "Ladies Almanack" (1928) forces us to reconsider the dominant theoretical lexicon for the positive affects, in which the term ‘pleasure’ becomes conflated with an exclusively sexual pleasure, and with a particular way of enjoying sex. What happens, this paper asks, when we think of sexual pleasure without jouissance, and of sexual pleasure as a form of pleasure not entirely unlike others? I argue that Barnes’s Almanack illustrates the proposition that pleasure, happiness, joy, and bliss are not mutually exclusive terms but might instead participate in a productive overlapping. The assumed integrity of these terms and their supposed relations to one other might, I suggest, prove quite inadequate for describing the different ways in which Ladies Almanack makes one feel good. I am particularly interested in how Ladies Almanack might trouble some of Roland Barthes’s hierarchical theorizations of pleasure in The Pleasure of the Text. Barnes’s suggestion that happiness is ‘here,’ within the very pages of her Almanack, represents a challenge to Barthes’s emphasis on the ‘atopia’ of textual pleasure. Not only does the Almanack challenge the idea that the highest pleasures are asocial and solitary, but Barnes unabashedly links the rewards of challenging modernist textuality to the pleasures of material and commodity culture. In a text that is also a highly pleasing material object, Barnes positions reading as bodily activity on a continuum with other physical and material pleasures, including sex, fashion, and shopping. Yet the Almanack also questions pleasure’s associations with fleetingness and novelty, instead situating happiness in a continuous but variant present tense created out of a dynamic remembering of the past.

Julie Taylor is a doctoral candidate at the University of York in the final stages of a thesis entitled ‘Beyond Difference: History, Affect, and Djuna Barnes’s New Modernist Subject.’ Her essay, '"The Voice of the Prophet": From Astrological Quackery to Sexological Authority in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack,' appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of Modern Fiction Studies.

Wine and refreshments provided.

If you are interested in attending please email to help us know approximate numbers and ensure future updates.

The Collector as Artist: Lady Eccles and Oscar Wilde
Lecture
Time: 18:00
Speakers: John Stokes (Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature, King's College London). Together with Dr Mark Turner (King's College London), he is now editing Wilde's journalism for the Oxford English Texts edition of the Complete Works.
Mary, Viscountess Eccles (1912 - 2003), was one of the foremost collectors of her time, amassing an outstanding wealth of material relating to Wilde which she bequeathed to the British Library. The Eccles Collection of Oscar Wilde comprises almost 2,000 items, including manuscripts (correspondence, works, etc.) printed books (among them a number of presentation copies and books from Wilde's own library) and a wide range of ephemera.

This talk celebrates the completion of the cataloguing of the Collection, which is now available through the Library's online catalogues, and explores the ways in which the creativity of the collector can inspire the imagination of the scholar.

Followed by a drinks reception. Attendance is free, but please register your name with Teresa Harrington at the British Library.

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Helena Barbas, 'Interactive Fiction – narratives without memory'
In mobile narratives – as in any kind of interactive fiction – creativity lies in the (physical or virtual) route taken by the user and is a consequence of the several nodes/links she chooses to navigate. From this user’s agency emerges a new relationship between the literary concepts of story and discourse that interferes with the normal structure of plot and the technical traditional artifices to create suspense (the bifurcation). Immersed in the story – as a character/avatar, narrator/drama-manager – the user inhabits the diegesis. Real time and space turn into a stage where the fiction takes place. Reality becomes hybrid or enhanced; the users’ perception of time and space is altered. However, in fictional terms, this interferes with the literary ruses to deal with time (flashback/flash-forward). As all the events are transposed to the present, the «now» of the user experience, this kind of story has no memory.

The absence of narrative memory is one of the theoretical issues resulting from the practical experience with the InStory project (2006), specifically the creation of an interactive fiction for web mobile devices (pda). This project will be used as a case study for the questioning of other narratological issues, namely the concepts of author, character and plot. Also, it allows proposing some clarifications concerning the digital concepts of interaction, creativity, the role of the word in mixed realities, and the relationship between IF and games. As future work will be presented PlatoMundi-A voyage with Er, an adventure/quest browser immersive, multiplayer, 3D MMORPG serious video game, with basis on Plato’s «Myth of Er» as narrated in Book X of the Republic (612a-621d).

Biography
Helena Barbas (1951) is Professor-Lecturer of the Department of Portuguese Studies – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (F.C.S.H. – U.N.L.). She holds a MA (1990) and a PhD (1998) in Comparative Literature – Literature and the Arts. In 2003, she attended the Master of Applied Artificial Intelligence at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (F.C.T. - U.N.L.), and became a researcher for CENTRIA in 2005. She gained her “Habilitation” (2008) in Literature and Cyberarts. Helena authored books and several essays, translated theoretical texts, novels, drama and poetry. She has collaborated with diverse newspapers, magazines and with national TV cultural programs. She writes literary reviews for the national weekly broadsheet «Expresso».

Professor Barbas’ present research interests are multimedia storytelling, IF, avatars, the usage of AI decision models and agents behaviour and serious games. She was a member of the InStory Project team. Presently she is preparing a project on serious games, PlatoMundi, aiming to introduce e-learning and ethical issues in game playing. See http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/docentes/hbarbas/ for more.

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: David Ten Eyck, Canto 67

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Richard Grayson (Goldsmiths), 'Military History from the Street: Methods and Stories from the Case of West Belfast 1914-1918'

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Revisiting the Victorian East End

David Feldman(Birkbeck), 'Historians and the East End'

Alastair Owens (Queen Mary), 'Fragments of the Modern City: Reading the Material Culture of Everyday Life in Victorian London'

The 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize Readings
Other events
Time: 19:30
Speakers: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanain, Fred D’Aguiar, Jane Draycott, Philip Gross, Sinéad Morrissey, Sharon Olds, Alice Oswald, Christopher Reid, George Szirtes, Hugo Williams
After a near sell-out last year, the T S Eliot Prize Readings will once again be staged at the Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. All ten poets on the shortlist will read from their collections on the eve of the judges' decision on the winner. The judging panel this year is chaired by Simon Armitage, with Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle.

Tickets are on sale now, priced at £12, from the Southbank box office, or tel. 0871 663 2500.

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:15 - 19:00
Speakers: John Lavagnino (King's College, London) and Bradley Scott, 'On digital Shakespeares'

Open University Romantic Period Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Jane Moody (York), 'Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, and the Censorship of "Jacobin" Theatre'
READING (both texts are available to download from Google Books):

Elizabeth Inchbald, "Such Things Are" (1788), Elizabeth Inchbald, "Next Door Neighbours" (1791), Thomas Holcroft, "Knave or Not" (1788).

Jane Moody is Professor of English Literature at the University of York and founding Director of York's Humanities Research Centre which opened at the end of 2009. She is the author of "Illegitimate Theatre in London" (Cambridge UP, 2000), and co-editor of "Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000" (Palgrave, 2005) and the "Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830" (Cambridge, 2007). She is currently completing a monograph on literature, theatre and censorship in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature and culture.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Joel Anderson and Tony Fisher (Central School of Speech and Drama), 'Rehearsing Boal'

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

History of Communication: Seminars 1 & 2
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Seminar 1: ROADS AND THEIR CULTURES: Benet Salway, 'Roads, tribes, and regional identity in Roman Italy'; Frances Wood, 'Roads in China'; Nicolas Barker, 'Canals and Roads and the Growth of a Provincial Press in the 18th Century'; Paul Stiff, 'Designs on the roads: being modern in 1959'

Seminar 2: POSTAL SYSTEMS: Philip Beale, 'The early Royal Mail in England, the Corsini correspondence and the Merchant Strangers' Post'; Iain Stevenson, 'Henry Fawcett and the people's post office'; Peter Sutton, 'Modernising a postal system: industrial politics and automation in British sorting offices'
Seminar 1: 11.00am-1.00pm
Seminar 2: 2.00pm-4.00pm

Attendance is open to all but please let us know you wish to attend by emailing Jon Millington.

Provenance Research in the British Library
Colloquium
Time: 14:15 - 19:00
Speakers: see below
Launch event for the publication of Libraries within the Library: "The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections", ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009).

Dispersed along the shelves of the British Library today are many volumes that once stood side by side in private libraries. Libraries within the Library explores some of the most important printed collections which have been brought together within the British Museum Library since its foundation in 1753, casting new light on the individuals whose personal interests and taste they reflect. The launch of this volume will provide an opportunity to hear papers on recent developments in the field.

Programme:
2.15pm: Welcome
2.30pm: David Pearson, 'Learning from collections'
3.00pm: Alison Walker, 'Halfway there? An update on the Sloane Printed Books Catalogue'
3.20pm: Phil Harris, 'The Old Royal Library and legal deposit in the 18th century'
3.40pm: Discussion
4.00pm: Tea
4.30pm: Stephen Parkin, 'Finding and losing: the provenance of an Italian Polybius in the British Library'
4.50pm: John Goldfinch, 'A group of incunables collected in the eighteenth century'
5.10pm: David McKitterick, 'A view from Cambridge'
5.40pm: Discussion
6.00pm: Reception

Attendance is free, but please register your name with Teresa Harrington at the British Library.

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Caroline Davis (Oxford Brookes), 'Publishing Wole Soyinka: Oxford University Press and the Creation of "Africa's Own William Shakespeare" '
Caroline Davis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Publishing at Oxford Brookes University, where she teaches book and publishing history on the undergraduate and MA publishing programmes. She is currently carrying out research towards a PhD at the Open University on the subject of OUP’s African literary series, "Three Crowns", supervised by Dr. David Johnson and Prof. Robert Fraser. An article based on this research was published in "Book History" in 2005: 'The Politics of Postcolonial Publishing: Oxford University Press Three Crowns Series 1962–1976'.

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Emily Steiner (University of Pennsylvania), ' "In the mouths of lords": Piers Plowman at the dinner table'

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 18:45
Speakers: Samu Niskanen (Oxford), 'Perceptions on earliest witnesses of St Anselm's correspondence'