Past Events

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

Palaeography and Diplomatic for Historians cancelled
Short course
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Speakers:

Debby Banham, Caroline Barron, Paul Brand, Professor Michelle P. Brown, Elizabeth Danbury, Professor Judith Green, Julian Harrison, Dr. Beth Hartland, Aaron Hope, Nigel Ramsey, Carole Rawcliffe, Patrick Zutshiy

Term 2, Thursday afternoons, 2.00-4.00 for 10 weeks, commencing January 2012.

This course is designed to introduce historians to the palaeographical study of a range of source materials, mostly in Latin, English and French, such as accounts and rentals, wills, manorial records, official documents, chronicles and correspondence.

Categories of material will be introduced and contextualised by experts in each field and practice in transcription and interpretation will be undertaken in class. The period covered will range from the Anglo-Saxon age to the 16th century.

The course will be under the direction of Professor Brown and Dr Danbury, with participation by invited specialist lecturers and will include some supervised access to original materials within the Senate House Libraries special collections. There will be 20 hours of face-to-face teaching, including transcription exercises, and it will be assessed by a 5000 word essay.

Further details and application form.

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Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar: Landmarks in Book History
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Claire Squires (Stirling): 'Bestsellers and Beyond'
Professor Claire Squires is Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication at
the University of Stirling. Her publications include Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary
Writing in Britain, and she is co-Volume Editor for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond.

Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Warren Buckland (Oxford Brookes), 'Wes Anderson and the New Sincerity: Or, What Comes After Postmodernism?'

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

Dr Kristen Kreider (RHUL): 'Reflections on a Future Nostalgia: Exploring Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Image and its Expansion through Contemporary Art'

London Screenwriting Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 21:00

Anna Sofia Rossholm (Linneaus University): 'The Screenplay and Cinematic Modernism: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona'

This paper discusses the role of the screenplay in modernist auteur cinema of the 1960s in relation to modernist aesthetics across film and literature. The various screenplays and notebooks of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona are examined as case in point for conceptualizing screenwriting as a modernist practice of fragmentation and transposition. The study is informed by perspectives of genetic criticism and postmodern textual criticism where ‘textual instability’ and ‘textual fluidity’ are keywords for understanding manuscripts and other avant-textes as a form of writing that makes the discontinuous and fragmentary dimension of a work of art as process visible.

Anna Sofia Rossholm, assistant professor in Film Studies, Linneaus University, Sweden. Rossholm has published articles and a book on intermedial and transcultural relations in European cinema. She is currently working on a research project on Ingmar Bergman’s notebooks and screenplays.

Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Seminar
Time: 17:00 - 19:00

Text:
Susanne Langer ‘The Symbol of Feeling’ in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art;
Kenneth Wright: photographs of found objects.
Commentator: Kenneth Wright, Psychoanalyst

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

Dr Tom Walker (Trinity College, Dublin): 'Not Just a Precursor: MacNeice's Irish Poetry'

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

Modernism and the Popular
Len Platt (Goldsmiths): 'Modern and Modernism in West End Musical Theatre, 1895-1939'
Michael Sayeau (UCL): 'Modernism: Ads Without Products'

The Future of Poetry
Seminar
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Kathleen Jamie’s Tree House: a consideration.

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

"Have you got medieval yet?"
Carolyn Dinshaw, Got Medieval? (2001)
Caroline Bynum, Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective (1995)
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (extract) (1999)
CLICK HERE FOR READINGS

As well, we are asking everyone to look at: The Book of Margery Kemp, Chapters 11 & 36
(available: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/kemp1frm.htm )

South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Amina Yaqin (SOAS, University of London):  'The poetics and politics of Imagining Pakistan in recent diasporic fiction'

Open University Book History and Bibliography Seminar: Landmarks in Book History
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Susan Pickford (Paris): 'Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters'
Dr. Susan Pickford is senior lecturer in translation at the University of Paris 13. Her research interests are in
intercultural transfer and the social and cultural history of translation from the eighteenth century to the
present. She is also a literary translator and SHARP's regional liaison officer for France.

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

Richard Firth Green (Ohio State University): 'The Early History of the London Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called "Oaths" '

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

R. Justin Hunt (Roehampton), 'Swapping Spit'

Swapping Spit is a paper that describes rather than criticizes. It employs writing as a means of saving and, thus, sharing an experience of queer culture. It’s anti-social, insular. It drips. (Salvation comes in many forms.) In this paper I describe Mitch & Parry’s I HOST YOU. NOW TONIGHT, LET ME SHOW YOU (2009). I describe the experience of experiencing – of watching and being with a piece which spits in the face of the Other. In this way the paper attempts to queer ethnography, or, maybe, to ethnographically engage with queerness. Ethnography requires of its participant observer description which oozes with reflexivity – with analysis hinged on the self-Othering capacity of both experience and writing. Through this paper I hope to share a ritual of queerness, which utilizes anti-social behaviour, and consider the queerness of ritual, which might disturb meaning, spitting in the face of any easy identification (if that can ever be).

Louise LePage (Royal Holloway), '‘What a piece of work is a man’: A Post/Humanist Approach to Modern Dramatic Characters'

Last year, the National Theatre produced a contemporary dramatic version of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. Featuring a role-swapping device that saw its actors switching, bi-nightly, between the characters of Frankenstein and the Creature, the play finds that the identity of ‘the human’ does not lie in the naturalness of its status but in its capacity to change and to re-make itself; this human is not a creator or a creation: it is both and, in being so, it is its own protean product.

Having articulated the human self in such post/humanist terms as a complex and hybrid natural-cultural entity – significantly, as an agent-product – I argue that its roots may be found in Renaissance humanism. I also argue that this human’s complex and protean form are lifelike and bound to the birth of modern dramatic character, in particular, to Shakespeare and the figure of Hamlet. In short, my paper posits that conventional ways of knowing the human, and of interpreting dramatic character, as a stable, coherent, and autonomous form (i.e. as a liberal humanist subject) or else as an inhuman product (i.e. a vacant subject position) are problematic and that a post/humanist model of selfhood offers a more precise and, potentially, illuminating approach to dramatic representations of the human.

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

Peter J. Forshaw (University of Amsterdam): 'As Above, So Below: Medieval and Early Modern Conjunctions of Astrology and Alchemy'

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

Alessandra Panzanelli (University of Perugia): 'An unpublished Treatise of Librarianship in the Italian Renaissance. De Bibliothecis disponendis et informandis, by Prospero Podiani (Perugia 1535 ca - 1615)'.

This treatise, written in Perugia in about 1570, concerns the way of arranging a general collection and, at the same time, the way of arranging the knowledge contained in the books of a general collection.

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Rick Gekoski: 'Book Collecting in Modern Times'. 

The first in the new series of seminars organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies (London University) and the ABA Educational Trust will be given by Rick Gekoski, distinguished equally as a writer, broadcaster and one of the most outstanding rare book dealers of our time. Rick is regularly heard on on radio as a guest commentator on topics relating to rare books and the book trade - and has written and produced three series of Rare Books, Rare People for BBC Radio 4 – “one of the gems of Radio 4” in the view of at least one critic.  He also writes a regular blog for The Guardian - Finger on the Page - on books and the business of book-buying.  You can read a sample post on by clicking on Rare Book Catalogues.  His published work includes Joseph Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist 1978; William Golding: A Bibliography (with P. A. Grogan) 1994; Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books 2004, and Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir 2009. Widely known as a compelling and highly articulate speaker, brimming with anecdote and reminiscence, Rick will reflect on the major patterns of book collecting over his thirty years in the rare book trade, the notion of value in these matters, and many another thing. His own website can be found here at www.gekoski.co.uk.

Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar: Landmarks in Book History cancelled
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

SESSION CANCELLED AT SHORT NOTICE.

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

"Examined Life" DVD Screening

"The unexamined life is not worth living." —Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets...  In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today's most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer's thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue's posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco's Mission District questioning our culture's fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America's best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

All are welcome to attend.

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

Katherine D. Harris (San José State University): 'A Supple Vocabulary for Digital Scholarly Editions'

Peter Porter: A Memorial Celebration
Lecture
Time: 18:00 - 20:30

Presented by Kings College London and the Institute of English Studies, Mrs Christine Porter and family, friends and colleagues will celebrate the life and work of Peter Porter.

Speakers include Martin Bax, Alan Brownjohn, Adrian Caesar, Wendy Cope, Roger Covell, Warwick Gould, John Kinsella, Tim Liardet, Sean O’Brien, Don Paterson, and Anthony Thwaite, with reflections on the wide range of Peter Porter’s contributions to Australian and British culture, and readings from his work.

Venue: The Australian High Commission, Strand, London WC2B 4LA (corner the Aldwych and the Strand). As there will be security checks, you are requested to keep bags to a minimum.

NB: PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED