Past Events

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

November 2010

01 November 2010
(Monday)

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Robyn Wiegman: 'Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures' (2000)
Wendy Brown: 'Women's Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics' (2003)
Marge Piercy: Excerpt from Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

CLICK HERE FOR EXTRACTS.

 

02 November 2010
(Tuesday)

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Renae Satterley (Middle Temple Library): 'The library of Robert Ashley (1565-1641) of the Middle Temple'. In 1641 Robert Ashley bequeathed his substantial library of ca. 4,000 items, in order to re-establish a library at Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. This collection, which remains intact at Middle Temple, is an important example of an early modern gentleman's library. This talk will provide an overview of its contents, provenance of items, and discuss its place in the history of London libraries.
Venue: Middle Temple Library
NB: THIS SEMINAR IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.

 

03 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Open University Seminar: Biography
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Philippa Bernard: 'Biographizing Kathleen Raine'

An early graduate of the Open University, Philippa Bernard worked for the French section of the BBC before she and husband established a flourishing antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea, where the poet Kathleen Raine was among their customers. Philippa was General Editor of Antiquarian Books: A Companion for Booksellers, Librarians and Collectors, and she regularly lectures for the National Trust. Her biography of Raine, No End to Snowdrops, appeared in 2009.

 

05 November 2010
(Friday)

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Katy Hayward (Belfast), ‘Exacerbation and Transformation: The role of political discourse in conflict’

 

06 November 2010
(Saturday)

George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
Conference / Symposium
Time: 09:30 - 17:30

This one-day conference will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the novel which marked a turning-point for Eliot herself, in the terms of a complex working-through of personal history and memories, but also in terms of the development of nineteenth-century fiction. In a letter to her publisher John Blackwood, Eliot wrote of a need for a “widening psychology” to better understand the vicissitudes of modern life. This conference will consider this broadening-out of thinking and subjectivity in the context of “the personal” in the novel; but also in its encounter with the feelings of others, and in its elegiac meditations on the nature of the past and time, and on a society that was rapidly changing.  CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.

 

06 November 2010
(Saturday)

Methods and Resources
Seminar
Time: 10:00 - 16:00
Speakers:

Dr Wim Van Mierlo


Methods and Resources MA Study Day 1: 'Going to the Sources: Heuristic Methods and Bibliographical Resources'

For postgraduate students in English/Literature MA programmes.  The aim is to discover a wide range of resources that will help students identify and locate books, articles and other materials relevant to their research. The seminar is free of charge, but please register to book a place by emailing jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

The day is loosely structured and will consist of good-practice tips, a demonstration of online catalogues and bibliographical databases, and a number of hands-on exercises.  Students are requested (a) to complete an exercise in advance of the session (click here for exercise); (b) to bring a copy of the MHRA Style Guide (which can be downloaded from the website here http://www.mhra.org.uk/Downloads/index.html).

It is anticipated that the session will end by 3.30-4pm.  An one-hour lunch break (at your own provision) will be around 12.30 or 1pm.  For specific inquiries, please contact Dr Wim Van Mierlo at wim.van-mierlo@sas.ac.uk.

 

06 November 2010
(Saturday)

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

Late Modernism
Daniel Katz (Warwick): 'Roots and Branches:  Very Late Modernism and the New American Poetry'
Rod Rosenquist (Newbold College): 'Rewriting the modern: literary memoirs and late modernism'

 

06 November 2010
(Saturday)

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Catherine Wilson (University of Aberdeen): ' "Vain Philosophy": A 17th century Theme'

 

08 November 2010
(Monday)

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:15 - 19:00

Roslyn L. Knutson (University of Arkansas at Little Rock, U.S.A.): 'Reportorial Commerce in Marlowe’s Time';
Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago, New Zealand): 'Towards an Historical Account of Skill: Early Modern Playing'

 

08 November 2010
(Monday)

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

NB: THIS IS A RE-SCHEDULING OF THE POSTPONED 1 NOVEMBER MEETING

Elizabeth Pender (Cambridge): Djuna Barnes' Short Stories.  In our second session of the term Elizabeth Pender (Cambridge University) will be leading a discussion of Barnes's short stories. Bringing together a selection of these stories, and paying particular attention to the revisions that occured in later collections, discussion will include a consideration for the ways in which the stories relate to different periods of Barnes's writing (the different contexts of those produced early in her writing career, whether the stories should be seen as precursors to the novels and how Barnes's substantial revisions for Spillway interpret and alter the earlier stories); the way the stories articulate a stance in relation to modernism and to modernism's gender politics; the network of other writers that the stories allude to; the original publication of some of the stories in The Little Review and other little magazines and collections; the status of A Night Among the Horse s as a collection, with poems and plays as well as stories; the contrasts (if any!) between the stories in the 1929 collection and the stories later published in Smoke and Other Stories; the noticeable recognisability of Barnes's writing across a number of different literary forms and publication contexts; and/or other points that arise in the course of the seminar

The stories suggested for discussion are:
'The Terrible Peacock' 'The Jest of Jests'
'A Night Among the Horses' (1929 version)
'The Robin's House' 'The Passion' (1929 version and revised version)
'A Little Girl Tells A Story to A Lady' ['Cassation'] (1929 version)

Anyone pressed for reading time is encouraged to concentrate on the *four later stories*, which will be the focus of the discussion. Some of the stories were substantially revised for Spillway (1962), and it would be great if we could look at the revisions to 'The Passion'.  The stories can all be found in Collected Stories (1996), ed. by Phillip Herring, in their revised versions. The 1929 versions of 'A Night Among the Horses', 'A Little Girl Tells A Story to A Lady' and 'The Passion' can be found in A Night Among the Horses (1929) OR in Lawrence Rainey's Modernism: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2005). If needed, texts can be sent, please contact me separately if this is the case. 

 

09 November 2010
(Tuesday)

Reading & Reception Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Ruth Padel (University College London): 'Writing the Forest'.  

    “In that electric moment when human meets king cobra eye to eye, each is liable to confuse the other’s motive. Keep still, he thought. Be very still.”  The prize-winning poet Ruth Padel set her first novel Where the Serpent Lives in Indian forest, Devon woodland, and London in  the year of the July bombs. Tonight she explores what “forest” is in the context of myth, theatre and the jungle of human relationships. She is now working on a mixed book of prose and poems (a prosimetrum, in fact) on migration and immigration, animal and human. She will illustrate her talk with readings from her novel, from new poems on cells, bird migration and the human need to see human meaning in the wild, and her poems on her great great grandfather Charles Darwin: the meanings, laws and forms Darwin found in nature.  

Jointly organised with the the Research Project: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe: http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/

 

10 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Session 3: The Politics of Disappointment: 
Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (and possibly an extract from Very Little... Almost Nothing) (no speaker).

NB: EARLIER START TIME

 

11 November 2010
(Thursday)

Joint Seminar: Digital Text and Scholarship Series & Textual Scholarship Series
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Brian Vickers (Institute of English Studies): 'Software programs, authorship attribution, and the nature of language'.  NB: ROOM CHANGE.

 

12 November 2010
(Friday)

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

 

13 November 2010
(Saturday)

Victorian Popular Fiction Association Study Day
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 17:00

It is the aim of this study day to explore issues of thematic interest in the work and lives of Victorian popular novelists.  We are using the life and work of Florence Marryat as a starting point for this exploration but would hope that the nature of the themes under discussion – female detectives, identity, the Victorian press, marriage reform - would be of interest to academics working in similar areas in the work of other Victorian popular novelists. 

Speakers: Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway): 'Female detectives in late nineteenth-century fiction and Florence Marryat’s In the Name of Liberty'; Georgina O’ Brien Hill (University of Chester): '(Re)claiming Identity in Florence Marryat's Her Father's Name and Wilkie Collins's No Name'; Tatiana Kontou (University of Sussex): '1865: Literature, culture and Florence Marryat'; Beth Palmer (University of Surrey): 'Florence Marryat and the Victorian Press'; Catherine Pope(University of Sussex): '"The chain that galls": Florence Marryat and the campaign for marriage reform'

This event is free but if you wish to be kept informed of events organized by the VPFA then a membership form for our association can be downloaded from our website. For further information about VPFA Study Days and Conferences: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/victorian/

 

15 November 2010
(Monday)

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Extra Session: DVD screening of Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance. Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation.
NB: DIFFERENT DAY OF THE WEEK.

 

17 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Inter-University Seminar: Romanticism and Postcolonialism
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Charles Forsdick: 'Representing the Revolutionary: The Afterlives of Toussaint Louverture'

Recommended Reading: William Wordsworth, ‘To Toussaint Louverture’ (1803), C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938), Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995), and Edouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint (trans. J. Michael Dash and Edouard Glissant, 2005).

Charles Forsdick holds the James Barrow Chair of French at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (2000) and Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (2005), co-author of New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literatures in French: Genre, History, Theory (2006), and co-editor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003).

 

17 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Open University Seminar: Biography
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Maggie Fergusson: 'Biographizing George Mackay Brown'

Maggie Fergusson read History at Oxford and began working for the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is currently Secretary, in 1991. Her prize-winning life of the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown appeared in 2006 and draws on conversations in Orkney with the poet, his family and friends, together with unpublished correspondence held in the Edinburgh University archives. Maggie is currently working on a commissioned life of the children’s author Michael Morpurgo. She was elected FRSL in 2008.

 

17 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Andrea Brady (Queen Mary): Title to be confirmed

 

18 November 2010
(Thursday)

Senate House Friends AGM and Lecture
Lecture
Time: 16:00 - 19:00

4.00pm Senate House Friends annual general meeting followed by a lecture at 6.00pm by Ann Jarvis (University Librarian, Cambridge), "Maintaining excellence under pressure: redefining Cambridge University Library's role in a rapidly changing information environment."

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.

 

18 November 2010
(Thursday)

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Dr Jayne Ringrose (Cambridge University Library): 'Cataloguing the Additional Manuscripts of Cambridge University Library'

 

18 November 2010
(Thursday)

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:30 - 20:30

Professor Mary Luckhurst (York University): 'Reality check: Actors Playing Real People'

 

19 November 2010
(Friday)

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Helen Carr (Goldsmiths College): Ur-Canto 3

 

20 November 2010
(Saturday)

London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar
Seminar
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

Spaces of the Screen: Pre- and Early Cinema
John Plunkett (University of Exeter): ‘Touring Shows/Moving Images: Local and Global in the Exhibition of Optical Shows 1840-1900’;
Laura Marcus (University of Oxford): ‘The Space Between: 'Movement' and 'Moment' in Early Film and Early Film Aesthetics’

 

24 November 2010
(Wednesday)

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Chris Jones (University of St Andrews): 'Lineating Old and Early Middle English Poetry'

NB: SENATE HOUSE WILL BE CLOSED ON WED 24 NOVEMBER.  The LOMERS seminar will be held in the Conference Room at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square

 

24 November 2010
(Wednesday)

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE): 'The Deepest Wounds: On Blows to Narcissism'.

NB: SENATE HOUSE WILL BE CLOSED ON WED 24 NOVEMBER 2010. Literary and Critical Theory Seminar will be held in the Chancellor's Room at Hughes Parry Hall, 19 – 26 Cartwright Gardens, London, WC1H 9EF

 

29 November 2010
(Monday)

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

Joanne Winning (Birkbeck): 'Drawing the Line Between: Anachronism and Dialogue in the Art Practices of Thelma Wood and Djuna Barnes'. In addition, Cathryn Setz (Birkbeck) will also be presenting an informal discussion on Nightwood and anachronism. There is no additional reading required for the seminar. 

In 1935, whilst editing Nightwood, Djuna Barnes writes to Emily Coleman: ‘I do not want to have Robin mentioned as one of the Bohemian world for the simple reason that I do not want to connect her in any way with the temporal world as we know it.’ Barnes’ removal of Vote from the ‘temporal world’ renders her a subject without a time and place, something like Barnes’ biographical construction of Thelma Wood herself, an artist anachronistically using the technique of silverpoint in the time of modernist experiment, without a birth certificate or a fixed birthplace. At the outset, this paper reinstates the time and the place of Wood’s aesthetic practice. Research reveals a body of visual work that might be characterized by its articulation of strange states of hybridity: human-animal, animal-plant, human-plant (themes that emerge so centrally in Nightwood). Wood articulates an erotic-grotesque that conveys the abjection and beauty inherent in sexual desire, especially dissident desire within a dominant culture that finds it abhorrent. This paper asks what effect Wood’s art practice has on Barnes, who came into the relationship with Wood, an established visual artist. Barnes returns to illustration in 1928, but as Frances M. Doughty argues ‘the illustrations for Ryder and Ladies Almanack show a marked break from Barnes’ prior work.’ In examining the anachronistic use of technique and the lines of form in the visual work of both, this paper argues for the existence of a more profoundly important creative dialogue between Barnes and Wood, than Barnes’ atemporal constructions seem to admit.

 

30 November 2010
(Tuesday)

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

David McKitterick (Trinity College, Cambridge): 'Libraries at risk'.
Several recent cases have drawn attention to the fragility of libraries as we know them - both large and small. In a world of changing attitudes to books, as well as perennial problems of cash shortage, how can library historians in particular contribute to a debate that will become even more urgent in the next few years?