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: Stephen Massil (National Trust), 'Libraries of the National Trust: some houses in Kent and Sussex - Shakespeare, landscape and the in-laws'
Some observations and experience of cataloguing for the National Trust where place, family, and changing generations put `provenance' at the heart of the process.

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Sam Halliday (Queen Mary, University of London), 'Modernism and the Seashell'
John Michael Gomez-Connor (University of Cambridge), 'Death by Modernity: Sound, Identity, and Interruption in William Faulkner'
Chair: Gail McDonald (University of Southampton)

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Seth Koven (Rutgers), 'Cockney Cosmopolitan: The Match Factory Girl and Nellie Dowell in East London and the World'

Poetry Society Annual Lecture
Lecture
Time: 19:00 - 20:30
Speakers: Les Murray, 'Infinite Anthology: Adventures in Lexiconia'
In a rare UK appearance, Australian poet Les Murray gives the Poetry Society's annual lecture, in which he'll explore his life-long fascination with word-collecting. From the folk words and country speech he heard as a child, to the new coinages he collects for the Macquarie Dictionary, Murray explains how he has used poetry as a word-store. From rangas and pobbledonks to belly leggings and jail tats Murray serves up some of the words that have most inspired him, while discussing how he's chosen to direct each word's unique potency. He finishes the evening with a poetry reading.

Les Murray is one of the "super-league" of world poets writing today. The son of a tenant farmer, Les Murray was born in 1938 on the remote north coast of New South Wales. He still lives nearby at Bunyah. The winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, he has published over 30 volumes of poetry and been translated into ten languages.

"There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and so conversational." Derek Walcott on Les Murray.

For more information about Les Murray see: www.lesmurray.org. NB: LES MURRAY WILL BE A GUEST ON "START THE WEEK", BBC RADIO 4, MONDAY 10 MAY 2010 AT 9.00.

£12 (£8 Poetry Society members, IES members and concessions). CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS.

Senate House Library Friends Talk
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Frances Boyle (UK Research Reserve), 'The UK Research Reserve (UKRR): securing knowledge for research'
Senate House Library Friends Talk. The UK Research Reserve (UKRR) is a collaborative distributed national research collection managed by a partnership between the Higher Education sector and the British Library. It allows Higher Education libraries to de-duplicate their journal holdings of a title if two copies are held by other UKRR members, ensuring continued access to low-use journals, whilst allowing libraries to release space to meet the changing needs of their users.

At the beginning of the second year of activity it's full speed ahead for UKRR and its membership, as we approach the third cycle of activity which promises to be the busiest yet.

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.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Speakers: Nadine Holdsworth (Warwick), Helen Freshwater (Birkbeck), Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway), Jen Harvie (Queen Mary), 'Theatre &: pedagogy and publishing'

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Stoddard Martin (Independent Scholar), Canto 84

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

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Wouter Hanegraaff (University of Amsterdam), 'Historians of Error: The Protestant Attack on Platonic Orientalism'

Djuna Barnes Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes), 'Spectacle, Technology and Performing Bodies: Djuna Barnes at Coney Island'. Chair: Caroline Knighton (Birkbeck College)
NB: HELD OVER FROM 26 APRIL
Click here for extracts and abstract.

Venerable monitors: Viewing the Acropolis through the ages
Lecture
Time: 18:30 - 19:30
Speakers: William St Clair (Institute of English Studies Senior Research Fellow)
In this illustrated talk, William St Clair will discuss the viewing conventions of three main constituencies, the people of Athens, visitors from abroad, and those who saw Athens only in their imaginations. Starting with the Enlightenment, when modern genres of viewing were formalised, and going back through chronological layers, he suggests how his approach can help reconstruct how the Acropolis was viewed in antiquity.

His starting point is that it was the viewers who made the meanings.

Co-hosted with the Institute of Classical Studies. Free and open to the public, and followed by a wine reception. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington at the Institute of English Studies; tel. +44 (0)207 664 4859.

MMSDA Public Lecture
Lecture
Time: 17:30
Speakers: Simon Tanner (King's College London Digital Consultancy Services) Details to be confirmed.
Offered in conjunction with the AHRB funded course Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age.

Victorian Popular Fiction Association Forum
Seminar
Time: 15:00 - 17:00
Speakers:

Janice Allan (University of Salford), 'Pianos and "pernicious literature": class and infanticide in Ellen Wood’s Parkwater'; Andrew Mangham, (University of Reading), 'Anatomical Sketches by Boz'

JANICE ALLAN: Despite the growing critical interest in Ellen Wood, Parkwater (1879) – a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-educating working-class girls – remains both under-studied and under-read. This paper will explore how the novel capitalises upon contemporary anxieties that class identity is performatively constituted and thus open to impersonation. At the same time, by comparing the 1857 New Monthly Magazine serial to the 1879 edition, I will suggest that Wood’s chameleon-like powers of adaptation bring her into an uneasy alliance with the fraudulent working-class schemer at the heart of her story.  

Janice Allan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford. She is the editor of Bleak House: a sourcebook (2004), sits on the Editorial Board of Clues: a Journal of Detection and has published a number of pieces on sensation fiction and its critical reception. Recent and forthcoming publications include: ‘The Canon: Mapping Writers and their Works’ in A. Maunder and J. Phegley’s Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2010); ‘“Conversing with Monstrosities”: evolutionary theory and the contemporary response to the novels of Wilkie Collins’ in M. Llewellyn and D. Birch, Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2010); and a chapter on Dora Russell for P. Gilbert’s Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011). She is currently working on The Sensation Novel Sourcebook for Liverpool University Press.  

ANDREW MANGHAM: This paper will explore the impact that forensic medicine, particularly autopsy practice, had upon the style of Dickens's earliest work. It will be argued that Sketches by Boz, and Dickens's formative style more generally, had much to learn from the theories and methodologies of medical jurisprudence. 

Andrew Mangham is lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Reading, UK. He is the author of Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (2007), editor of Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays (2007) and co-editor of The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (2010). He is currently at work on a monograph entitled Dickens’s Anatomy: Medicine, Journalism and the Rise of Boz and is editing The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction.

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Visit to Dulwich College Library. Numbers will be limited. Bookings to Keith Manley.

Alleyn's legacy at Dulwich - the College of God's gift, now Dulwich College - preserves in its Archives one of the world's major resources of Jacobean theatre history, reflecting the interests and career of its founder Edward Alleyn, contemporary of Marlowe, Donne, Jonson et al. Its Fellows' Library of nearly 6,000 books represents the acquisitions of 350 years by gentlemen clerics, sometimes academic, sometimes schoolmasterly in taste, with the flavour of the country house library closet dispersed throughout. The group will be given a taste of the collections' history, shown the Archives premises and some of the gems of the collections, which in addition to theatre material span medieval MSS, incunabula, and exploration and literary figures among former alumni (Wodehouse, Chandler, Shackleton, etc.).

The Young Muslim Writers Awards 2010
Other events
Time: 13:00 - 16:00

Celebrating the best of young Muslim literary talent, with artworks by Mohammed Ali of Aerosol Arabic  and poetry performances. The winners of the Young Muslim Writer of Year as well as winners of Best Short Story and Best Poetry categories will be announced at the awards ceremony.  The Young Muslim Writers Awards is held in partnership with the DCSF, The Institute of English Studies, University of London, Puffin, Booktrust, HSBC Amanah, IF Charity, Food4Thought, Abacus Wills, Islam Channel and is a Muslim Hands project.  

For more information please visit:http://muslimwritersawards.org.uk/awards/2010/young-muslim-writers-awards  

If you would like to attend please email: rsvp@muslimwritersawards.org.uk

Joint Seminar: LFAS and Digital Text & Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Michael Whitmore (University of Wisconsin-Madison), 'Profiling Genres in the Corpus of Early English Drama'

Jointly organised by  London Forum for Authorship Studies and the Digital Text & Scholarship Research Seminar.

In this talk, Michael Witmore (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde University) will discuss their research into the underlying linguistic matrix of early modern dramatic genres using multivariate statistics and a text tagging device known as Docuscope, a hand-curated corpus of several million English words (and strings of words) that have been sorted into grammatical, semantic and rhetorical categories. The talk will focus particularly on the place of Shakespeare's work in the broader context of early modern drama. Details on this research can be found at www.winedarksea.org.

Institute of English Studies Director's Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 12:30 - 13:30
Speakers: Julia Novak (IES Visiting Research Fellow, University of Vienna), 'Live Poetry: Approaching Poetry in Performance'

Chris Baldick’s definition of poetry as “language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense” (Concise Oxford Dictionary) indicates its dualistic nature as an art: poetry may exist in oral performance and as written text. However, literary studies have mostly ignored poetry’s oral mode, which is noticeable, for instance, in the absence of a coherent methodology for the analysis of live poetry that takes into account the aesthetic and contextually determined characteristics of live performance. This paper sets out to demonstrate by way of an example the aesthetic potential and context-dependence of live poetry and suggests ways of analysing poetry performances.

All welcome.  Please feel free to bring lunch.  Drinks will be provided.

History of Communication: Seminar 7
Seminar
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Speakers: Karen Radner, 'Standardisation, normalisation and reassurance in state and private  letters of the Assyrian Empire (8th-7th centuries BC)';  Melissa Terras, 'Reading Ancient texts: computers, experts, and systems'
"I’m OK, you’re OK": communication as a process of standardisation, normalisation and reassurance.

T. S. Eliot Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Stefan Collini, Alexis Kirschbaum, George Simmers, 'What we want from these editions'

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

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers: Vera Keller (University of Southern California), 'Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Artisan and Philosopher'