Past Events

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

January 2011

07 January 2011
(Friday)

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

 

10 January 2011
(Monday)

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

DVD screening of: Derrida (2002, directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman)

 

13 January 2011
(Thursday)

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Ernesto Priego: 'Comic Book Markup Language: Challenges and Opportunities'

Abstract. This seminar will introduce and discuss CBML, a TEI-based XML vocabulary for encoding comics, comic books and graphic novels that has been developed by John Walsh and Michelle Dalmau (Indiana University, 2002-2010). CBML provides standard extensions to the encoding metalanguage developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It uses TEI to build an XML vocabulary for encoding metadata and content present in some comic books, particularly American serialised single-issue comic books. CBML offers a system for encoding important aspects of comics, such as panels, speech and thought balloons, narrative captions, sound effects, advertisements, credits, letter columns, etc.

In this seminar I will argue that comics as a communicative language has historically expressed itself through a kind of unique materiality - complex and intertwined processes involved in the creation of comics and their place-specific interaction with the reader - that has often varied from culture to culture. The seminar will explore how this materiality differs from that of other media and how it produces and is simultaneously the consequence of particular 'textual topologies'. Hence, I argue, comics are partially untranslatable to digital and other media. The materiality of comics helps us to interrogate the idea that such translation can be done without significant loss or without making the work into something else. I will argue that XML alone is insufficient, that comic book digitization and text encoding need to take into account the non-digitisable aspects of comic book publications, in other words, spatio-temporal textual dimensions that cannot be fully represented on a computer screen or interface.

Bio. Ernesto Priego wrote his PhD thesis about the materiality of comic books electronic comics publishing and digital media (UCL, 2010). His master's thesis dealt with traumatic structure in graphic narrative in Art Spiegelman's Maus (UEA Norwich, 2003); his BA thesis explored how narratological tools could be used in the analysis of Watchmen (UNAM, 2001). He has been doing comics scholarship for at least 15 years. He writes about graphic narrative for the Nieman Storyboard of Harvard University and other publications. Ernesto is a HASTAC Scholar for 2010-2011.

 

14 January 2011
(Friday)

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

Canto 2

 

15 January 2011
(Saturday)

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

John Stokes (Emeritus Professor of Moern English Literature, KCL): 'Oscar Wilde's "A Note on Some Modern Poets" (1888)';
Sally Newman (King's Collge London): '"Bizarre Love Triangle": The erotics of pedagogy in the letters of Mary Robinson Duclaux, Vernon Lee and John Addington Symonds'

 

15 January 2011
(Saturday)

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

History and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:

Per Landgren (University of Gothenburg, Visiting scholar at Oxford): 'Natural History and the Aristotelian Concept of History'; Dmitri Levitin (University of Cambridge): 'Pious corpuscularians and idolatrous Aristotle: Robert Boyle on the history of philosophy'

 

17 January 2011
(Monday)

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

Barnes and Others

 

19 January 2011
(Wednesday)

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

Shane McCorristine (NUI Maynooth and Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge): ‘The Spectral Place of the Franklin Expedition in Contemporary Culture’             

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of a plethora of novels and other literary treatments which sought to re-imagine the career of Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) and the tragic circumstances of the expedition under his leadership which sought to traverse the North-west Passage through the Arctic in 1845. The disappearance of this expedition, perhaps the most memorable episode in nineteenth-century Arctic history, incited frenzied speculations about its fate throughout the Victorian era and beyond in which spiritualists and clairvoyants, as well as writers and investigators sought to imagine what really happened.  The Franklin expedition came to occupy a spectral place in contemporary culture: as Margaret Atwood put it, “Because Franklin was never really ‘found’, he continues to live on as a haunting presence”.  This paper highlights the spectral analogies between the attempts to discover the fate of Franklin in the 1850s, and the sudden eruption of novels and other investigations in the 1990s dealing with the demise of the expedition. In both cases supernatural tropes occupied a central role in how Western audiences confronted Arctic disaster and thereby invited varied speculations on, and spectralizations of, the mysterious disappearance of so many Victorian explorers. Through a thematic exploration of selected Franklin fiction, as well as a survey of recent attempts by archaeologists and explorers to locate the expedition’s lost ships, this paper examines the place of the Franklin expedition in the contemporary imagination. Such an examination locates the Franklin disaster at the heart of recent Arctic fiction and establishes the ghostly presence of Franklin in modern poetics as a reminder of how the disappearances of the past can act on the present in a manner which demands recurring articulation.

Biographical Note: Shane McCorristine is currently an IRCHSS CARA Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the Department of English, NUI Maynooth and Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Since graduating with a PhD from University College Dublin in 2008 he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UCD, Trinity College Dublin, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maxamilians Universitaet Muenchen. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in 2010 and developed a project entitled 'Dreamscapes of the Arctic in Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Exploration'. He has published articles on surrealism, psychical research, and Walter de la Mare. His monograph is entitled Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge, 2010).

 

19 January 2011
(Wednesday)

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

Susan Powell (University of Salford): 'The Perils and Pleasures of Editing Mirk’s Festial'

 

19 January 2011
(Wednesday)

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

Professor William Rowe (Birkbeck College): 'Barry MacSweeney'.

NB: MEETING BACK ON!

 

20 January 2011
(Thursday)

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

Dr Robert Gibbs (Glasgow University): 'A short art-history of the Liber Extra (Gregory IX’s Decretals)'.

The seminar will be followed at 7.00pm by a launch party for Teaching Writing, Learning to Write: proceedings of the XVIth Colloquium of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, ed. Pamela Robinson (King's College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2010).  Please contact jon.millington@sas.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

 

20 January 2011
(Thursday)

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

 


Postgraduate panel:
João Florêncio (Goldsmiths), ‘Of Metal, Blood, Glitter and Soil – Towards a Complex Ecology of Live Art’
Joseph Mercier (Central), ‘Fuck the Stage: Queer Strategies for Radicalizing Performance through Submission and Degradation’

 

21 January 2011
(Friday)

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

 

26 January 2011
(Wednesday)

Dean's Seminar: The Archaeology of the Poem
Seminar
Time: 12:30

Dr Wim Van Mierlo, Institute of English Studies

http://www.sas.ac.uk/events/view/8879

 

26 January 2011
(Wednesday)

Inter-University Seminar in Romantic Studies
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Philip Shaw (Leicester): on Sublime Objects
Viewing: Neo-Assirian Panel, ca. 660-50 BC, British Museum
Reading: Thomas De Quincey 'On War' (1854)

Professor Philip Shaw is author of Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination and organiser of the research group on "Sublime Objects" at Tate.

 

31 January 2011
(Monday)

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

Charlotte Scott (Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.): ‘War and Peace: Henry V and the Language of Improvement’
Emma Smith (University of Oxford, U.K.): ‘”Such Readers we wish him”: Reading the Shakespeare First Folio’

 

31 January 2011
(Monday)

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