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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 December 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. In the second of these sessions, on Thurs 1st December, we will continue our discussion of chapter 1, 'Bow Down'; we suggest also rereading chapter 2, 'La Somnambule', as we may begin looking at that too. 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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01 December 2011 |
Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Christopher Lewis (Bath Spa): 'Laughter, Violence and Irony in the 'Wild Body' Writings of Wyndham Lewis'. In a journal entry in the summer of 1908, as Wyndham Lewis observed the abandoned square at Clohars after the village fete, he noted the human tendency both to enter into an ‘orgaic participation [in] life’ and also the disposition of the village elders to sit apart, ‘robed, physically & spiritually in the garment of strangeness’. These comments, I suggest, catalogue the distinct human tendencies towards self-individuation, and the immersion of the self into a greater unity, and clearly anticipate both the detached perspective of the satirical narrator and the embedded nature of the cast of ‘man-machines’ which populate the subsequent short stories. Paying close attention to the earliest ‘Wild Body’ writings, I aim to discuss the unique nature of Lewisian satire and the connotations of violence, which come with the entrance of ‘the Soldier of Humour’. Close attention will be paid to the colliding pressures which lurk behind the formation of selfhood in Lewis’s characters and narrators.
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01 December 2011 |
London Theatre Seminar
Dr Sophie Nield (Royal Holloway): 'Resisting representation: Occupy and the dramaturgy of public order'
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02 December 2011 |
Irish Studies Seminars
cancelled
Prof. Mary Hickman (London Metropolitan University): 'Social Cohesion and the notion of "suspect communities": comparing Irish and Muslim experiences in Britain' NB; THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED AT VERY SHORT NOTICE DUE TO ILL HEALTH. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A LATER DATE.
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03 December 2011 |
Modernism Research Seminar Series
New Work in Modernist Studies: Postgraduate Conference. This is the first joint event of the three British modernist seminars - the London Modernism Seminar, the Northern Modernism Seminar and the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies - and in association with the British Association for Modernist Studies. Twenty-five postgraduates from fourteen different institutions across Britain will present ten-minute papers on their research. Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow) and Andrew Thacker (De Montfort) will respond, and the day will conclude with a keynote paper by Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London), and a Christmas party. THIS CONFERENCE IS NOW FULLY BOOKED. For details see: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2011/Modernism2011/index.htm
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06 December 2011 |
Senate House Library Friends Visit
Senate House Library Friends Visit: Middle Temple Library, Middle Temple Lane London EC4Y 9BT Friends members only. 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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06 December 2011 |
History of Libraries Research Seminar
Mark Purcell (National Trust): 'The Invisible Library; Books, Book Rooms and Inventories at a Northamptonshire Manor House'
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06 December 2011 |
Textual Scholarship Research Seminar
Patricio Ferrari (University of Lisbon): 'Fernando Pessoa's Private Library and Archive: Challenges in Posthumous Textual Criticism'
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06 December 2011 |
New Screen Histories Seminar
Sarah Street (University of Bristol): 'Colour Transformations in Wartime Britain'. Colour became a highly desirable format for features and shorts during WW2, in spite of material problems and shortages affecting its use. Followign a major AHRC-funded research project on colour and British cinema 1900-1955, Professor Street proposes a model for analysing the impact of technology in relation to cultural, aesthetic and economic contexts. NB: LATE CHANGE OF ROOM.
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07 December 2011 |
South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick): 'Violence and Militancy as Infrastructural Conditions in Contemporary South Asian literature' MOVED FROM 30 NOVEMBER.
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07 December 2011 |
Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
'Fat Identity and Intersectionality' READING:
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08 December 2011 |
London Screenwriting Research Seminar
Steven Price (Bangor University): 'Textual Variety in the Classical Hollywood Screenplay'
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08 December 2011 |
London Theatre Seminar
Dr Catherine Silverstone (Queen Mary): 'Shakespeare's Scripts for Queer Desires in Lost and Delirious (2001)'
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09 December 2011 |
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Text: Poem 258, 'There's a certain Slant of light' Commentator: Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths, University of London and Psychoanalyst)
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09 December 2011 |
Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Bernard Dew (independent scholar): Canto 116
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09 December 2011 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
We will continue with the `Hades' episode (Chapter 6), p. 86, l. 619 (Gabler ed.): `The server piped the answers......'.
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10 December 2011 |
The Singing Detective: 25th Anniversary Symposium
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the six-part serial The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter and directed by Jon Amiel, occurs November-December 2011. The serial is regarded as a piece of landmark television because of its narrative complexity, generic hybridity and formal experimentation. It has inspired and influenced a range of subsequent television drama. This one-day symposium will bring together a mixture of practitioners and scholars to explore the making of this ground-breaking production and to assess its subsequent influence upon television drama and the cinema. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION.
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10 December 2011 |
London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Dr Marta Weiss (Victoria and Albert Museum): 'Self-portraits of Richard Cockle Lucas'
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10 December 2011 |
EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Italian Renaissance philosophy in the vernacular: Alessandro Piccolomini
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12 December 2011 |
London Shakespeare Seminar
Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University, Belfast): ‘Shakespeare and world cinema: Romeo and Juliet’
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14 December 2011 |
South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Pooja Sinha (Open University): 'We Write Like This Only’ – Popular Culture and Indian Chick Lit'
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14 December 2011 |
Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar
Professor Dorothy Wang: 'Race, form, and the avant-garde'
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15 December 2011 |
Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Sam Barrett (Pembroke College, Cambridge): 'Glimpses of Non-Liturgical Latin Song in the Carolingian Era: A Laon Schoolbook Reconsidered'
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15 December 2011 |
London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh: 'Hidden Histories: Computing and the Humanities c.1949–1980' The application of computing to the Humanities is not new and can be traced back to at least 1949, when Fr Roberto Busa began researching the creation of an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors. Notes and contributions towards a history of the computer in the humanities have appeared in recent years; however, our understanding of such developments remains incomplete and largely unwritten. The Hidden Histories project (funded by the University of Trier's Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungszentrum (HKFZ) and the Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL ) aims to gather and make available sources to enable the social, intellectual and cultural conditions that shaped the early take up of computing in the Humanities to be investigated. The project draws on an interdisciplinary method bundle from Oral History, Digital Humanities and Historical-Cultural Studies. With the aim of capturing memories, observations and insights that are rarely recorded in the scholarly literature of the field it carries out interviews with 'pioneer' or 'early adopter' scholars and practitioners from c. 1949 until 1980 (that is, from main frame computing to the coming of the personal computer). The presentation will give an overview of progress to date, with particular emphasis on the methodological pillars of our project. Anne Welsh is Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London and a member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Her research and teaching is centred on documentation, metadata and especially Historical Bibliography. Julianne Nyhan is a Teaching Fellow in electronic communication and publishing in the department of Information Studies, UCL and a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in the Centre for Digital Humanities, Universitaet Trier.
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16 December 2011 |
Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
We will resume reading at FW 515.35.
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17 December 2011 |
Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Rewriting Exodus: Dr. Anna Hartnell (Birkbeck) will be talking on her new book, Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from Du Bois to Obama in advance of publication next year. The book will trace a genealogy of the African-American liberation struggle through the prism of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the election of Barack Obama.
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