Past Events

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

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
READING: Catharine A. MacKinnon: ‘Introduction: Women’s Status, Men’s States’ and ‘Women’s September 11th: Rethinking the International Law of Conflict’ in "Are Women Human? and Other International Dialogues" (2006)

Judith Butler: ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’ in "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2009)

Denise Riley: ‘Outside from the Start’ in "Selected Poems" (2000)

Reading for the session is available HERE.

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Paul Quarrie (Maggs Bros. Ltd.), 'An intellectual library: the library built up between c. 1700 and 1750 by the earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle'
Paul Quarrie has been intimately involved in the discovery and documentation of this library since the mid 1990s, and since 2004 in its sad dispersal. He will discuss the nature, growth and composition of this remarkable library, and some of the figures involved in this.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 18:45
Speakers: Melissa Terras (University College London), 'Reading the Readers: Computational Approaches to the Palaeography of the Vindolanda Texts'

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: John Bradley, 'Pliny: providing tools for traditional scholarship'
From its beginnings about 60 years ago, the often stated purpose of the digital humanities has been to transform how scholarship is done. The recent claim made in the report from the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities is typical: “humanists are on the verge of [...] a revolutionary change in their scholarship, enabled by information technology" (www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/). My experience during the last 35 years in the field now called the Digital Humanities suggests a rather different reality and outcome. While the tools and techniques developed and proposed are exciting and full of possibilities for some kinds of scholarly investigation, I argue that they are not grounded sufficiently in mainstream humanities scholarship to effect the envisioned transformation. Many have noticed that the digital humanities has so far failed in its transformative mission. Many of the key people seem to believe that more of the same will finally make a difference. I disagree.

Pliny represents an attempt to express in software and to augment central aspects of what scholars actually do when they read a text, take notes on it and develop an interpretation from their reading. Pliny is indebted to tools available for many years in the social sciences and to more recent research in computer science but models humanistic scholarly practices. It is in and of the digital humanities but marks a significant break from traditional software development for the humanities. Its design is deeply indebted to the ideas of Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who argued that software with the least obvious presence has the greatest chance of making a difference to how things are done.

In my talk, I will introduce Pliny and present some of the intellectual foundations upon which it is built. I will also describe Pliny's second agenda: to bring some of the radical new research technologies somewhat closer to the methods of traditional scholarship.

Biography
John Bradley is a Senior Analyst for Humanities Computing at King’s College London and has worked on problems in the digital humanities since the 1970s. He came to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s in March 1997, having worked previously at the University of Toronto (Canada). A significant element of his work at CCH includes the management, design and analysis of a number of major multi-year collaborative research projects with discipline-specific partners from the humanities. These projects are funded by bodies such as the AHRC and the Mellon Foundation. They range in subject from music to history, and focus on issues that arise from modelling, collecting and presenting highly structured data and text from complex humanities sources. Mr Bradley also teaches in CCH’s academic program at both the undergraduate and MA level.

Personal research interests have centred on exploring the impact of digital tools on humanities research. Bradley was the principal designer for the TACT text analysis system in the 1980s and 1990s - a system that although now over 15 years old still has today an influence upon thinking about text-based tools within the digital humanities community. In more recent work, on Pliny (pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk), he has proposed and demonstrated a new role for computer tools to support scholarly research derived from an analysis of scholarly notetaking and its significance. In 2008 this work was awarded a MATC prize from The Mellon Foundation.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Tim Edkins (Queen Mary College), 'Feeling Productive'; Broderick Chow (Central School of Speech and Drama), 'Kim Noble will help you get through it: strategies for redefining the political in comedy performance'
Postgraduate Panel

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Neil Buttimer (University College Cork), 'London and Irish Manuscripts'

Methods and Resources
Seminar
Time: 10:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Wim Van Mierlo
Methods and Resources English MA Study Day 2. Mastering the Dissertation.

Attendance free and open to all University of London English Masters students. To attend please contact: wim.van-mierlo@sas.ac.uk.

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Anna Snaith (Kings College, University of London), 'Sarojini Naidu and the Colonial Metropolis'
Howard Booth (University of Manchester), 'Claude McKay in Britain: race, sexuality and poetry.'
Chair: Helen Carr (Goldsmiths, University of London)

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford Brookes), 'Nature unbowels herself: Margaret Cavendish, print and the scientific imagination'

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:15 - 19:00
Speakers: Margreta de Grazia (University of Pennsylvania), 'King Lear in the time before Merlin'

Chloe Porter (University of Manchester), 'Iconoclasm in The Winter's Tale'

Djuna Barnes Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Kate Armond (UEA), 'Nightwood, obscenity and the baroque devil'; Dr Rachel Potter (UEA), 'Obscene laughter in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood'.
"Nightwood III: Obscenity". Reading: Final pages of 'Go Down, Matthew' and 'The Possessed'. Excerpts available from the IES office on request: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk

In this paper I will unravel the significance of the phrase 'obscene laughter' in the concluding paragraph of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. On the carbon copy of the manuscript, T. S. Eliot, Barnes' editor at Faber, changed the word obscene to unclean, before deciding to change it back to obscene. My paper will consider why obscene might be the more appropriate word, looking at the importance of obscene laughter (as a kind of textual underside to wit) to the form and content of Nightwood, and late modernist writing more generally. The paper will consider the phrase in relation to a wider historical context of literary censorship and key discussions of literary freedom in critical essays of the 1930s. Informing my discussion will be Theodor Adorno's arguments about the obscenity and politics of laughing at Samuel Beckett's "Endgame".
Seminar Leader: Kate Armond.

Wine and refreshments provided.

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

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL SERIES PROGRAMME.

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Vedrana Velickovic (Kingston), ' "Seeing"/"Hearing" Bodies: The Question of (Un)Belonging in the Work of Bernardine Evaristo and Dubravka Ugresic '
Vedrana Velickovic is a final year PhD candidate and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Kingston University, London. She is currently writing up her doctoral thesis which explores the idea of (un)belonging in post-1990s black British and Former Yugoslav women’s writing. She is also organising a Life Writing Seminar Series within the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston to be held throughout the Spring semester 2010, and co-organising a postgraduate conference titled "Migrancy and/in the Text" to be held at Kingston University in July 2010. She has recently had a book chapter on the Former Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugresic, based on part of her research, published in Literature in "Exile of East and Central Europe" (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). She is particularly interested in exploring the intersections between postcolonial and black British studies/literatures and the studies/literatures of "Eastern Europe" and The Balkans.

Senate House Library Friends Visit
Seminar
Time: 14:30
Senate House Library Friends Afternoon Visit: Eton College Library

Charge: £5. Maximum group: 25. 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.

Textual Scholarship Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30
Speakers: Professor Henry Woudhuysen (UCL), 'The History of the Book and Textual Scholarship: Strange Companions?'

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Alex Pestell (University of Sussex), Canto 109

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
**Please note change of usual room**

Suburban Childhoods
Lecture
Time: 18:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Michael Frayn, Dennis Marks
A joint King's College London and English PEN event.

Venue: Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand, KCL. CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION.

Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Barbara Ryan (National University of Singapore), 'Reading "Ben Hur" '
Barbara Ryan teaches in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. She is the co-editor of "Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950" (Tennessee, 2002) and the author of "Love, Wages, Slavery" (Illinois, 2006). A more recent project is "Rubbed and polished: Reflecting on Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Conscience of the Court'" (American Literature, 2007). She is currently working on a history of the "Ben-Hur" event between 1880 and 1924.

Open University Romantic Period Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Julian North (Leicester), 'Letitia Landon: Biography and the Poetess'
READING:
Letitia Landon, "Lines of Life" (1829); "Corinne at the Cape of Mesina" (1831)
Glennis Stephenson, "Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L. E. L." (Manchester UP, 1995), ch 1.
Emma Roberts, 'Memoir of L. E. L.', in "The Zenana and Minor Poems of L. E. L." (London: Fisher, Son &Co.; Paris [1839?]. Available at The British Women Romantic Poets Project online archive.

Dr Julian North is a lecturer at the University of Leicester, specialising in nineteenth-century literature. Her most recent book, "The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet" (Oxford University Press, 2009), explores the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets – including Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon – and the creation of biography as a popular form. She is one of the editors of "The Works of Thomas De Quincey" (2000-2003) and the author of "De Quincey Reviewed" (1997). Her current research is on Mary Shelley, T. J. Hogg and nineteenth-century life-writing, in relation to vitalism and the reanimated body.

T. S. Eliot Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: 'I am not a linguist, nor was meant to be', Iman Javadi (Institute of English Studies, T. S. Eliot Research Project)
Drawing on unpublished and uncollected writings, this seminar will assess T. S. Eliot’s command of modern languages and discuss his familiarity with some major works of European literature.

John Coffin Memorial Palaeography Lecture
University Trust Fund Event
Time: 18:00
Speakers: Dr Teresa Webber (Trinity College, Cambridge), 'Reading in the Refectory: monastic practice in England from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries'.
The readings delivered to monastic communities each day in the refectory, and the books used for this purpose, have received comparatively little detailed attention. This lecture will examine the surviving evidence and explain the principles underlying the selection of texts for the readings. It hopes to bring a new perspective to the history of monastic book production and the formation of book collections in England in the central middle ages.

Dr Teresa Webber, FSA, FRHistS, is a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, and University Senior Lecturer in Palaeography and Codicology in the Faculty of History. She has published "Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c.1075-c.1125" (1992), and co-edited "The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons", Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 6 (British Library/British Academy, 1998) and with Elizabeth Leedham-Green Vol I of the "Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland".

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception. All welcome. If you would like to attend please contact jon.millington@sas.ac.uk | tel. +44 (0)207 664 4859.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Chris Megson (Royal Holloway), Amanda Stuart Fisher (Central School of Speech and Drama), Derek Paget (University of Reading): Panel on Documentary Theatre

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Politics and "Race" in the East End
Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle), ' "Thou cursed Moloch-Mammon": Jews and the Economics of White Slavery in Radical Fiction'

David Glover (Southampton), 'From Tottenham to Houndsditch: Aliens, Terror and Popular Fiction in Edwardian London'

History of Communication: Seminars 3 & 4
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Seminar 3: LIBRARIES AS RELAY STATIONS: Eleanor Robson, 'Libraries and textual mobility in Assyria and Babylonia'; Matthew Nicholls, 'Libraries in the Ancient World'; Rowan Watson, 'Travelling by proxy'

Seminar 4: ANTHOLOGIES AND ANTHOLOGIZING: Stephen Quirke, 'The Spirit of Anthology in ancient Egyptian writings'; Michelle Brown, 'Anthologies in Anglo-Saxon England'; Abigail Williams, 'The shaping of literary taste in the eighteenth century poetic miscellany'
Arrive 10.30am for coffee.

Seminar 3: 11.00am-1.00pm
Seminar 4: 2.00pm-4.00pm

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

The Communist Manifesto - London 1848
Lecture
Time: 18:30
Speakers: Eric Hobsbawm; chair, Gareth Stedman Jones (Professor of Political Science, King’s College, Cambridge)
Marx and Engels’ "Manifest der Kommunistichen Partei" is one of the most famous and influential political documents in world history. It was written for a group of German revolutionary exiles based in London during November–December 1847, and printed in February 1848 as a clandestine pamphlet for private distribution.

Despite a flurry of interest at the time, there are relatively few surviving copies of this slim 23–page pamphlet. To mark the recent acquisition of a copy of the first edition by the British Library, this talk by one of our most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm, will explain how and why the Manifesto emerged, before going on to play its extraordinary role in world history.

Cost: £7.50 / £5 concessions. Tickets available at British Library Box Office, tel. 01937 546546 (9am-5pm Mon-Fri), or in person at The British Library.

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Ipshita Ghose (University of Kent), 'Desirous daughters: women, performance, and popular culture in Shobha De’s "Starry Nights" (1991) and Anurag Kashyap’s "Dev D" (2009)'
Ipshita Ghose is a doctoral candidate and an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent. Her research interests include postcolonial and diasporic fictions, visual culture, and urban literature in India, and she is currently working on a thesis titled "Fictions of the postcolonial city: reading Bombay-Mumbai as the 'locus classicus' of modernity in India", supervised by Dr. Alex Padamsee and Prof. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Ipshita has recently contributed a book chapter to "The Idea of the City: Early Modern, Modern and Postmodern Locations and Communities" (2009) and is writing an article on post-liberalization trends in Indian Writing in English, which has been selected for publication early next year.

Senate House Library Friends Book Group cancelled
Seminar
Time: 19:00 - 20:30
Speakers: Sally Dugan: In Search of "The Scarlet Pimpernel", by Baroness Orczy
THIS MEETING HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

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