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Please note: For events from 1999 to September 2005 you will need to view our Events Archive. |
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01 April 2011 |
Irish Studies Seminars
Marianne Elliott (Liverpool): 'Wolfe Tone and the Common Name of Irishman'
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04 April 2011 |
Textual Scholarship Seminar
Anthony James West (The Malone Society): 'The Identification of the Stolen University of Durham First Folio'
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04 April 2011 |
Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Theorising a Psycho-linguistic Maternal: The Matrixial Borderspace: Bracha Ettinger, 'Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze', in The Matrixial Borderspace (2006)
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05 April 2011 |
History of Libraries Research Seminar
Roger Gaskell (Roger Gaskell Rare Books, Warboys): 'Architecture for books: the London College of Physicians and the seventeenth-century library'.
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05 April 2011 |
Open University Seminar: Biography
Elleke Boehmer: 'Biographizing Mandela' Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. Raised in Durban, tri-lingual in English, Dutch and Afrikaans, she has held chairs at Nottingham Trent and Royal Holloway, London. She has published four novels: Screens Against the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000) and Nile Baby (2008). Her book Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995) is a set critical text in literature departments worldwide. Elleke is co-investigator on the “Making Britain” project. Her Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction was issued by OUP in 2008.
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07 - 08 April 2011 |
Chaucer and Celebrity: The Fourth London Chaucer Conference
Speakers include: Thomas Prendergast (College of Wooster) and Nick Havely (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York). Our current obsession with celebrity has had a profound, even distorting effect on the contemporary literary market and cultures of reading. A new reliance on ghost-writing and a fascination with fame and scandal, for example, have disrupted post-enlightenment fixations on the author-category and literary merit, bringing us to an interesting point of contact with earlier cultures of literacy. As the reputation of Geoffrey Chaucer himself demonstrates, the simultaneously repellent and fascinating nature of modern celebrity culture presents clear parallels with that of the late medieval world. Chaucer's own celebrity emerged quickly and has been enduring. From the seemingly reverent imitations of his contemporaries and followers - like Usk, Hoccleve and Lydgate - through the popularity of Chauceriana in early modern print, to the countless appropriations and adaptations of his work in our own times, Chaucer has been a more or less constant star within the English literary canon. And Chaucer was deeply interested in questions of celebrity: in the relationship between fame and authority, in the fame of literary creations such as the Wife of Bath, in legends and lives. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.
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08 April 2011 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
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16 April 2011 |
Book Destruction
Keynote speaker: Kate Flint on 'The Aesthetics of Book Destruction' Why do people destroy books? What are the mechanics of book destruction: the burning, pulping, defacing, tearing, drowning, cutting, burying, eating? What are the cultural meanings that have been attached to book destruction, and what do they reveal about our investments in this over-familiar object? Why should the burning of books have such symbolic potency? Much attention has been given in recent years to the book as a material, historical object and its possible technological obsolescence in the era of digitization. Such reflections have tended to concentrate on the production and cultural circulation of books, their significance and their power to shape knowledge and subjectivities. But there is another aspect to our interactions with the book which remains relatively unexplored: the history of book destruction. In certain circumstances books are treated not with reverence but instead with violence or disregard. This conference reflects on this alternative history of the book with papers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION
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16 April 2011 |
EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Occult Philosophy in the Renaissance Didier Kahn (CNRS, CELLF 17e-18e): 'Gerard Dorn and the pseudo-Paracelsian tract Monarchia Triadis in unitate (1577)';
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