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: Patricia Williams: 'On Being the Object of Property' in "The Alchemy of Race and Rights" (1991)

Mari J. Matsuda: 'When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method' and 'We the People: Jurisprudence in Colour' in "Where is Your Body? And Other Essays on Race, Gender and the Law" (1996)

Zora Neale Hurston: Excerpt from "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937)

Reading for the session will be available HERE.

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Dr. James Willoughby (University of Oxford), 'The medieval library of St George's Chapel, Windsor'
English collegiate libraries of the middle ages are poorly known outside those of the two ancient universities. The royal collegiate chapel of St George at Windsor possessed one of the finer collections, as witnessed by several medieval booklists as well as many surviving books.

Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Charlotte DeMille (Courtauld Institute), 'Keep with Blasted Devolution'

Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Nicola Watson (Open University), ‘Storied Vicinities: Romantic Acts of Reading on the Very Spot where...’
Nicola Watson taught at Oxford, Harvard, Northwestern and Indiana before joining the Open University. A specialist in the romantic period with a longstanding interest in reception studies, she is the author of a number of books: "Revolution and the Form of the Novel" (OUP, 1994), "England's Elizabeth: an Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy" (OUP, 2002 with Michael Dobson) and most recently "The Literary Tourist" (Palgrave, 2006), together with two edited collections of essays, "At the Limits of Romanticism" (1994, with Mary Favret) and "Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-century Culture" (Palgrave 2009), as well as articles and editions. Her most recent exercise in 'reading on the spot' was in Hannibal, Missouri, in the cave-system in which Tom Sawyer got lost, an enterprise associated with her current project on American literary sites.

Senate House Library Friends Talk
Lecture
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Karen Attar, 'The M. S. Anderson Collection: A New Old Collection of Writings on Russia, printed 1525-1917'
Senate House Library Friends Talk. The M. S. Anderson Collection, recently presented to the University, is newly catalogued and preserved. Dr Attar will introduce the travel narratives, works of fiction, histories and other items it contains.

The talk will be followed by a reception in the Grand Lobby to launch the M. S. Anderson Collection.

All welcome. Attendance free. 5.30 for 6.00pm.

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.

University College London English Graduate Conference: NIGHTMARE
Conference / Symposium
Time: 00:00
Speakers: Amy Billone, Lawrence Rainey
Creatively and comparatively, the 2010 UCL English Graduate Conference will examine ideas of nightmare in literature, art and film. The sessions are broadly organised to cover six major paradigms of nightmare, from the nightmarish geographies of Gogol's St Petersburg and Dos Passos's Manhattan, to transgression and boundary-crossing in Titus Andronicus , late Medieval Britain, and postmodern fantasy fiction. Recurring nightmares, waking nightmares and existential nightmares, from Gothic literature to Kurdish politics to Philip Larkin's Aubade, will be explored and discussed. The event will also host performance art, a poetry reading, a selection of artwork, and a screening of short films followed by an open discussion. Invited presenters, Professor Lawrence Rainey and Professor Amy Billone, will frame the day with talks, respectively, on disempowered figures in Gothic spectacles from Romanticism to the present, and the dream/nightmare of woman and modernity. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION.

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Bill Kissane (LSE), 'The 1922 Constitution in the European context'

Seaside Autobiography
Lecture
Time: 18:00 - 19:30
Speakers: Michael Bracewell, Lara Feigel, Andrew Kotting, Alan Read
A joint King's College London and English PEN event.

Venue: Old Anatomy Theatre, Strand, KCL. CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION.

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), 'Biology, Morality and the Novel'
Ronan McDonald (University of Reading), 'Darwinism, Modernism and the Irish Revival'
Chair: Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London)
**Please note room change for this session**

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: John Henry (University of Edinburgh), Gravity and "De gravitatione": The development of Newton's concept of action at a distance'
NB: NOTE ROOM CHANGE FOR THIS MEETING.

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:15 - 19:00
Speakers: Alison Shell (Durham University), 'Shakespeare and the God Terminus: The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline'

Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare's Globe), 'Performing Concealed and Missing Hands in Early Modern Drama'

Djuna Barnes Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Nick Hocking (Birkbeck), ' "Not revengeful, but much another thing": The Antiphon's Hobbesian aspect'. Chair: Dr Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes)
Click here for extracts from the play and a useful article on "The Antiphon".

Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Maria Ridda (University of Kent), 'Inside "The Temple of Modern Desire": Re-Collecting and Re-Locating Bombay'
Maria Ridda is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kent. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, concerns the mapping of transnational urban spaces in South Asian diasporic texts, with a particular focus on the reconfigurations of "India" from abroad. Her research interests include South Asian diasporic writing, postcolonial theory, early 20th century English, American and Italian literature. Maria has presented at a number of academic conferences on topics which include intertextuality, memory and the glocal city in postcolonial literature. She is currently teaching a course on American and European Modernist poetry and fiction. She has contributed a chapter to a collection on the reception of Indian Writing in English, and is preparing another about the Indian diaspora in the United States.

Open University Romantic Period Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Jacqueline Labbe (Warwick), 'Reading Jane Austen after reading Charlotte Smith'
READING:
Magee, William, 'The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen', in "Studies in the Novel" 7 (1975), 120-32.
Derry, Stephen, 'The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on "Persuasion" ', in "Persuasions" 12 (1990), 69-70.
Ehrenpreis, Anne, 'Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith', in "Nineteenth-Century Fiction" 25 (1970), 343-8.
Ford, Susan Allen, ' "No business with politics": Writing the Sentimental Heroine in Desmond and Lady Susan', in "Persuasions On-line" 26 (2005).
Labbe, Jacqueline, 'Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen', in "Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism", ed. Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 113-28.
Ty, Eleanor, 'Ridding Unwanted Suitors: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline', in "Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature" 5 (1986), 327-9.

Jacqueline Labbe is Professor of English at Warwick, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Arts Faculty. She is currently finishing a book entitled "Writing Romanticism" which argues that Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth in effect "co-wrote" Romantic poetry into being. Her next project will place Smith as the most significant influence on Austen.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 18:45
Speakers: James Clarke (Bristol), 'Monastic Manuscripts and their Readers in Late Medieval England'

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Wybo Wiersma, 'LogiLogi: Philosophy beyond the Paper'
LogiLogi tries to find an informal middle-road between good philosophical conversations and journal-papers by providing a form of quick, informal publication, peer-review, and annotation of short texts.
It is intended for all those ideas that one cannot turn into a full sized paper, but that one deems too interesting to leave to the winds.
It does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding their many problems), but of tags and links that can also be added to texts by others. And it features a rating- system modeled after journal-based reviewing in which well-rated texts earn authors more voting-power.

LogiLogi is free software. It has been under development by between 2 and 10 people for 3 years. A public beta is already online and fully functional at www.LogiLogi.org.

In the presentation I will explain what LogiLogi is, elaborate on some of the ideas & design-choices behind it & hope to inspire some discussion and constructive criticism.

Biography
Wybo Wiersma is currently doing the MA in Digital Humanities at KCL, and holds 3 (hons) BA-degrees: in Philosophy, History and in Humanities Computing. He initiated the LogiLogi project and presented it at DH and ECAP conferences, and also has co-authored various papers on computational linguistics together with Professor John Nerbonne
(Groningen) and others.

For more information on LogiLogi see:
http://www.logilogi.org/pub/beyond/paper.pdf or:
http://en.logilogi.org/Logi_Logi=Admin_User_4

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: P A Skantze (Roehampton University), 'Weathered Thresholds, Itinerancy, Sebald and Devotional Spectating'

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: David Barnes (Queen Mary’s), Canto 3

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: East End to West End, West End to East End

Susan Bernstein (Wisconsin-Madison), 'Reading Room Geographies of Late Victorian London: Constance Black Garnett, the British Museum and the People's Palace'

Anne Witchard (Westminster), 'Bedraggled Ballerinas on a "Bus Back to Bow": the "Fairy Business" '

History of Communication: Seminar 5
Seminar
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Speakers: Maps and Games:

Catherine Delano-Smith, 'Maps as Visual Communication--but with whom?';
Sarah Tyacke, 'Maps as Visual Explanation; Mapping Scientific Data';
Adrian Seville, 'Maps with a message: aspects of cartographic board games'

Textual Scholarship Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30
Speakers: Christopher A. Adams (SOAS), 'Returning to Parnassus: Textual Editing and New Strains in Bibliography'
The session will include a demonstration of R. Carter Hailey’s COMET optical collator.

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Joyce Hill (University of Leeds), 'Two bishops and a manuscript: Wulfstan, Leofric, and CCCC 190'

Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Mike Esbester, Paul Dobraszczyk, and Paul Stiff (University of Reading), ‘Interactions with information: designing and reading in everyday life, 1815-1914’
Paul Stiff is Principal Investigator and Mike Esbester and Paul Dobraszczyk are Postdoctoral Researchers at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading. They work on the AHRC-funded project, 'Designing information for everyday life, 1815-1914.' Paul Stiff, who worked in book published before returning to the academy, edited "Information Design Journal" 1985-2000 and in 1996 founded the annual series "Typography Papers", which he still edits. Paul Dobraszczyk is the author of "Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London's Victorian Sewers" (Spire Books, 2009) and has published many articles on Victorian visual culture. Mike Esbester is a social historian, and has recently published articles in "Book History" and the "Journal of Design History"; he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of York, on twentieth-century safety education and railway safety.

T. S. Eliot Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: 'Editing T. S. Eliot’s Complete Prose', Ron Schuchard, Jason Harding, Iman Javadi (Institute of English Studies, T. S. Eliot Research Project)
The general editor Ronald Schuchard and volume editors Jason Harding and Iman Javadi will discuss the scope, principles, and problems of editing the print and online editions of Eliot’s prose writings, with some specific examples for discussion with participants.

The Good of Criticism: The Value of Literary Studies
Conference / Symposium
Time: 00:00
This conference aims to articulate the public value of literary criticism and scholarship. It will explore the ‘good’ of literary studies in the broadest sense. How might we practise a commitment to an ethics and politics of literature? Is it appropriate or possible for scholars to speak about aesthetics and literary merit within the works they study? Can we articulate the contribution that research in literature makes to culture and society? AT THE UNIVERITY OF READING.Click here for further information.

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

Lecture and Book Launch: "Gandhi: Naked Ambition"
Lecture
Time: 18:00
Speakers: Jad Adams (IES Visiting Research Fellow)
'A semi-repressed sex maniac'? - Gandhi's experiments in chastity' by Jad Adams. Followed by the launch of "Gandhi: Naked Ambition" (Quercus, 2010).

All welcome. If you would like to attend please email Jon Millington.

Senate House Library Friends Talk
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Rosemary Ashton and Deborah Colville, 'Progressive Bloomsbury: the accumulation of reforming institutions in 19th century Bloomsbury'
Senate House Library Friends Talk. The Bloomsbury Project involves a range of researchers across disciplines in creating an archive illustrating 19th-century Bloomsbury's development. It will trace the foundation of many local institutions, including UCL, University College Hospital, the Homoeopathic Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and Women's Medical School, and incorporate biographical information.

All welcome. Attendance free. 5.30 for 6.00pm. 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.

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Clare Wallace (Charles University, Prague), ' "Don't mention the war": The Emergency and after in contemporary Irish literature and theatre'

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA), 'Renaissance Platonism, the lost Eurydice, and Orphic Song'
NB: NOTE ROOM CHANGE FOR THIS MEETING.