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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 November 2011 |
History of Libraries Research Seminar
Dr. Jane Grant (Centre for Instututional Studes, University of East London): 'From small beginnings: the History of the Women's Library' This seminar will take place at The Women's Library, Old Castle Street, next to London Metropolitan University's Calcutta House, and located behind Aldgate East Underground station. If you are planning to attend, please email keith.manley@sas.ac.uk. This talk will examine how the Library has grown from a few shelves of books in a former pub in 1926 to the world class institution it is today. It will also demonstrate the huge investment of time and effort which women have put into the library's development.
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04 - 05 November 2011 |
Ruins in Twentieth-Century British Art and Fiction
This conference proposes to analyze the hybrid function of ruins as they shift from sublime metonymies to broken hints of shattered times and troubled consciousness, focusing not only on the visual motif of ruins but on the function of citation as an attempt to include the ruined pieces of bygone art and cultural systems, whether the purpose be to "shore fragments" against ruin, as in the case of Modernism, or to challenge and deconstruct present exhaustion and past master discourses, as in the case of post-modernism. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.
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04 November 2011 |
Irish Studies Seminars
Prof. Ian Campbell Ross (Trinity College Dublin): 'Carlo Denina and "Mylady Mackenzie"; or, how an Italian invented Irish literature'
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05 November 2011 |
Re-Imagining the Brontës
The aim of the conference will be to reassess the Brontës’ perspectives on and uses of imagination (scientific; medical; childhood; romantic; poetic; visual; private; collective; auto/biographical; religious; political; theatrical; historical) together with the ways the Brontës’ works have been critically and creatively re-imagined from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION.
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05 November 2011 |
Modernism Research Seminar Series
Modernism and Disability
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05 November 2011 |
EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Matthew Landrus (Visiting Fellow, University of Oxford): 'De re militari, military engineering, and Leonardo da Vinci'
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09 November 2011 |
Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar
Peter Jaeger (Roehampton): 'Cage, Conceptualism, Recycling'
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10 November 2011 |
Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Richard Beadle (St John's College, Cambridge): 'Palaeography and the Pastons'
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10 November 2011 |
Textual Scholarship Research Seminar
Michael Hunter (Birkbeck): 'Reflections on Textual Editing'. This paper aims to stimulate discussion of the principles and practice of textual editing, with reference mainly to the early modern period. Various issues will be raised, but particular emphasis will be given to alternative methods of presenting manuscript texts in printed or digital form.
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11 November 2011 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
We will continue with the `Hades' episode (Chapter 6), p. 85, l. 589 (Gabler ed.): `A server bearing a brass bucket......'.
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14 November 2011 |
London Shakespeare Seminar
Rose Dixon (King’s College London): ‘Shakespeare and the dissenting academies’
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15 November 2011 |
Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Jane Elliott (King's College London): 'The Prison-House of Agency: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Aesthetics in Britain and the US’ The recommended readings are: 1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, (New York: Palgrave, 2004), ch. 11, pp. 267-290. 2. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), ch. 2, pp. 61-97. 3. Laurent Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations 63 (Winter 2007/2008): 33-51.
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16 November 2011 |
Senate House Friends AGM and Lecture
4.00pm Senate House Friends annual general meeting followed by a lecture at 6.00pm by Alistair Black (University of Illinois): 'From Centre of Culture to Cultural Centre: The Public Library in Britain since 1850' For 161 years the public library has been a major landmark on the cultural landscape of Britain, although aspects of its complexion and purpose have naturally changed during this time. Beginning as an institution with a leaning towards high culture, by the time the welfare state reached its high point in the 1960s the public library had embraced universalism, even if recent decades have shown that it's popularity and future are fragile as it both struggles against seemingly perpetual downward pressure on public spending and seeks an accommodation with information-age competitors and alternatives. 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.
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16 November 2011 |
Open University Romantic Period Seminar
Jacqueline Labbe: 'Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Romanticism' Jacqueline Labbe is Chair of the Warwick Graduate School and Director of its Humanities Research Centre, where she also teaches eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. She is the author of four monographs, the latest of which, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807, provides the material for her seminar.
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16 November 2011 |
South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Suman Gupta (Open University): 'Youth Culture and Contemporary Popular Fiction in India'
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17 November 2011 |
London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Jan Rybicki: 'The Translator’s Other Invisibility: Stylometry in Translation' Mona Baker's statement on translators' styles (as 'somewhat neglected in translation studies') has always sounded as a memento for my own literary translation work and has always led to the same question: when my target-language readers pay for their Polish Golding, Gordimer, or Ishiguro, are not they swindled into only getting Rybicki (himself not a Booker Prize winner) instead? More complex issues and translatorial blunders aside, are the readers indeed getting their money's worth at least in terms of style? Is there at all a Golding style in Polish, or does it vary from translator to translator? Somewhat against my intuitions (and misgivings), the application of stylometrical authorship-attribution methods to the problem paints a morally-soothing picture. In multidimensional analyses of most-frequent-word usage, authors of originals are usually recognized in translation despite the transfer into another language and its production by another hand; also, despite the obvious fact that most-frequent-word lists of originals and translations do not exhibit a simple word-to-word correspondence. It also presents new questions as to what it is that non-traditional authorship attribution methods really show. And it is a manifestation of a new kind of translator's invisibility unforeseen by Venuti. Jan Rybicki (b. 1963) is Assistant Professor of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland; he also taught at Rice University, Houston, TX. His interests include translation, comparative literature and humanities computing, especially stylometry and authorship attribution. He has worked extensively (both traditionally and digitally) on Henryk Sienkiewicz and the reception of the Polish novelist's works into English, and on the reception of English literature in Poland. Rybicki is also an active literary translator into Polish, with some thirty novels by authors such as Coupland, Fitzgerald, Golding, Gordimer, Ishiguro, le Carré, Oe, or Winterson.
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17 November 2011 |
Djuna Barnes Research Seminar
"I, Dr Matthew Mighty O'Connor, ask you to think of the night the day long..." As we begin to prepare for The First International Djuna Barnes Conference to be held next year, The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar will be asking how well we know Barnes and what assumptions we make about her work. Taking a short break from hosting monthly papers from invited speakers, the Research Seminar will instead spend the next sessions rereading Barnes's most famous text, Nightwood (1936), chapter by chapter. As always, we welcome postgraduates, academics and enthusiasts interested in the work of Djuna Barnes, her contemporaries, or issues relating to twentieth century literary culture, politics and aesthetics. Initially meetings will not be framed by specific critical issues or secondary reading, though these will of course be part of the discussion. Instead, we want to see where a direct encounter between the group and Barnes' prose takes us. To quote Malcolm Bowie's marvellous gloss on the ethos of critical theory, we will 'read slowly, read again, read against the grain.' Hopefully everyone will bring their own critical ideas to a collective endeavour to challenge assumptions, see the writing afresh, and provoke friendly debate. The first of these sessions, on Thurs 17th November, will be looking at chapter 1, 'Bow Down'. Those planning to attend the Seminar should read the expanded, annotated Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl Plumb, if possible, although the Faber and Faber edition will be sufficient.
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17 November 2011 |
London Theatre Seminar
London Theatre Seminar Postgraduate Panel:
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18 November 2011 |
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Text: Commentator: Lesley Caldwell (Psychoanalyst and University College London)
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18 November 2011 |
Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Stephen Wilson (Universidade Coïmbra): Canto 11
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19 November 2011 |
George Eliot Conference: The Lifted Veil and Silas Marner
This conference will discuss two of George Eliot’s most intriguing and contrasting works of shorter fiction: The Lifted Veil, published in 1859, and Silas Marner (1861). Narrated through the jejune and alienated central presence of Latimer, who has foreseen the date of his own death, The Lifted Veil draws on both supernatural and Gothic tropes in a tale that prefigures the complex psychological portraits of Eliot’s later novels. Written while Eliot was in mourning for her sister Christiana, it is often cited as her most uncharacteristic work, with the author herself remarking that it was ‘not a jeu d’esprit, but a jeu de melancolie.’ A more redemptive kind of sadness dominates Silas Marner, however, with its themes of exile, community and history, and marks a return to recognisable Eliot. Published in April 1861, it was praised by Henry James as being ‘more nearly a masterpiece’ than any other of Eliot’s oeuvre, having ‘that simple, rounded, consummate aspect . . . which marks a classical work.’ Yet beneath this fairytale simplicity exists a complex Comtean system of values that considers the nature of the individual and society; and of inheritance, both personal and parental. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.
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19 November 2011 |
London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Prof. Lindsay Smith (University of Sussex): 'Shopping in St Petersburg: Lewis Carroll's photographic longing'
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21 November 2011 |
Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Postgraduate Forum: The first in what will hopefully become a regular feature of the seminar series. This forum has been curated to showcase a broad spectrum of research currently being undertaken in the field. Students will be presenting from their ongoing research: Holly Giesman (Roehampton): Holly’s research interests include documentary and authenticity, cross-cultural documentary, creative practice as research, visual anthropology, the anthropology of food, and tourism studies. Christopher Holliday (KCL): Chris’ PhD interrogates the visual codes of the Hollywood computer animated film, focusing on the contradictory elements of aesthetic design, style and technique across a variety of texts, from Toy Story and Antz to The Polar Express and Beowulf. Daniel Marrone (London Consortium): Daniel’s research focuses on nostalgia and the semiotic operations of comic books, and he investigates the possibility that comics are particularly suited to longing for the past. Chair: Adam Lively (Royal Holloway): Adam is working on a PhD on narrative and multiplicity in prose fiction. As well as teaching creative writing, he has an extensive background as a novelist, journalist and broadcaster.
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22 November 2011 |
T. S. Eliot Research Seminar
Oliver Soden (Cambridge): Cross-dressed allusion in The Waste Land'
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23 November 2011 |
Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Benjamin Ware (University of Manchester): 'Ethical Endgame?' This paper – part of a chapter entitled 'Wittgenstein, Beckett and the Ethics of the Ordinary' (work in progress) – explores some of the difficulties involved in trying to understand Beckett's Endgame as an ethical work. Taking a new look at readings of the play by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell, it argues that these readings – despite significant differences in theoretical aim and political motivation – share a number of distinct family resemblances: (i) both view Beckett's play as bringing about a fundamental transformation in the ethical attitude or outlook of the reader; and (ii) both understand this transformation as one that is underpinned by changes in the reader's relationship with language. Biographical note: Dr Ware is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study. He is currently working on a project tentatively entitled 'Ethical Turns in Modernist Literature'.
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23 November 2011 |
London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Richard Dance (University of Cambridge): 'Twelfth-century English and Some Words Derived from Old Norse: Between the Old Law and the New'
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25 November 2011 |
Book History Research Network: The Future Perfect of the Book
At a moment when the rise of e-Readers foretells the end of the printed book, the founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle launches an initiative for the preservation of the book. He is creating a storehouse for physical books in specially-adapted containers on the West Coast of the United States in order to preserve them as “backup copies” for posterity. His idea came about as a reaction against the notion that books can be put beyond use (or thrown away) as soon as they are digitized. This colloquium, therefore, wants to consider not just what “will be”, but also “what would have been” – the future perfect of the book. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.
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25 November 2011 |
Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
We will continue at FW 515.20.
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29 November 2011 |
Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
cancelled
tbc
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29 November 2011 |
Medieval and Renaissance Close Reading Group
Peter McCullough (Lincoln College, Oxford) will lead close reading on a short excerpt from Lancelot Andrewes' 1605 Sermon on the Nativity, which can found in Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Writings, ed. P.E Hewison (Carcanet Press, 1995) pp126-8. Peter is a lay canon of St Paul's Cathedral, and has edited Lancelot Andrewes' sermons for OUP. He is currently editing John Donne's sermons for OUP.
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