What's on at the Institute of English Studies

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Palaeography and Diplomatic for Historians
Research Training
Venue: Senate House
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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Methods and Resources
Seminar
Venue: Room G34 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 10:30 - 16:00
Speakers:

Wim Van Mierlo

Methods and Resources MA Study Day 2
Wim Van Mierlo (Institute of English Studies): Mastering the Dissertation. Participants are invited to email in advance with particular questions or issues they would like to see raised: wim.van-mierlo@sas.ac.uk

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
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
Venue: Room 274 (Stewart House)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Kathleen Jamie’s Tree House: a consideration.

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
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
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
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
Venue: Room 103 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
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
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
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
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:30 - 20:30

tbc

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
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
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
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
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
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
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Kate Longworth (Oxford): 'How to do things with books: Wolfgang Iser's The Implied Reader'
Kate Longworth is completing a doctorate at Oxford University; her subject is the idea of the poetic drama
in twentieth-century England. She is in the early stages of research into the history of the National Book
Council/League.

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

tbc

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
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
Venue: Other
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.

If you would like to attend please contact rsvp.london@dfat.gov.au by February 10.

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Maureen O'Rourke: 'Poetry shaped by exile: a comparison between Pound and an Iraqi exile'

Mark Gonzales: Poetry Masterclass and Performance Series
Workshop
Venue: The Chancellor's Hall (Senate House, First Floor)
Time: 10:00 - 16:00

Poetry development masterclass by internationally renowned spoken word artist and educator Mark Gonzales making his UK debut.  Organised by the Muslim Writers Awards in association with the Institute of English Studies.

Described as ‘Khalil Gibran meets Pablo Neruda,’ Mark is a HBO Def Jam poet who has shared his writing on stage around the world, including the first TEDxRamallah talks held in Palestine, which led him to trend worldwide on Twitter. As a community builder he was an invited speaker at the United Nations tribunal on Social Exclusion. He is currently a Visiting Professor and Artist in Residence at the Institute of Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.  Mark’s work breaks borders to wage beauty across continents of language and culture, which has earned him respect for his creative approaches to suicide prevention, human rights and human development.  Joining us from his Middle East tour Mark will deliver two intensive masterclasses to a small group of writers, focussing on exploring poetry as a means to human development.

£25; Click here for registration.

The Rise of Creative Writing
Seminar
Venue: Room 273 (Stewart House, Second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Alison MacLeod (University of Chichester), Derek Neale (open University). 'Impacts on the Short Story'.

Alison MacLeod’s short stories have been widely published by, for example, Prospect, London Magazine, Bloomsbury, Virago and Comma Press, and broadcast on Radio 4.  In 2008 she was awarded the Society of Authors' Prize for short fiction, while her collection Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (Penguin) was named as one of the ‘Top Ten Books to Talk About in 2009’ in association with the Guardian and World Book Day events.  More recently, she was shortlisted for the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award for her story ‘The Heart of Denis Noble’, and she is currently completing her second short story collection.  MacLeod is also the author of two novels, The Changeling (Macmillan) and The Wave Theory of Angels (Penguin), and her next novel will be published by Penguin in 2013.   Alongside her writing, she is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester.

Derek Neale is an award-winning short story writer. A graduate of UEA’s MA in Creative Writing, he taught both fiction and scriptwriting there for a number of years. He has recently helped design a whole new generation of Open University courses, publishing three books about writing in 2009 – he co-authored two volumes, Writing Fiction and Life Writing (both Routledge) and edited, and was a principal author of, A Creative Writing Handbook: developing dramatic technique, individual style and voice (A&C Black). He was a contributing author in the influential volume Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings (Routledge, 2006), with chapters on the creative process, fiction and life writing. A book of his interviews with writers will be published in 2013. One of his recent interviews – with Iain Banks at the 2010 Cheltenham Literature Festival -  can be seen on YouTube. His novel, The Book of Guardians, will be published in July 2012 (Salt). He is currently Director of Teaching for English at the OU.

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 104 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

Isaac Yue (University of Hong Kong): 'Mrs Beeton Cooking Abroad: Martha Foster Crawford and the Victorian Middle-class Discourse of Gastronomy'

This paper explores the cultural and social implications of Martha Foster Crawford's Foreign Cookery (Zao yangfan shu) (1866) - the first Western recipe-book written in the Chinese language. In particular, I wish to pay attention to the subtle differences that existed between the culinary discourses of contemporary Britain and America and the way this significance is played out in Crawford's gastronomic practices.

In spite of China's growing interest in Western cookery, Crawford never specifically intended her compilation and subsequent publication of Foreign Cookery to play a role in the ongoing cultural dialogues that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead, her intention was simply to compose a practical manual to train her Chinese servants to prepare a proper Western meal for their employers. The text's significance thus lies in its reflection of the gastronomic preferences of Crawford and her contemporary missionaries operating in China at the time. Unfortunately, it has thus far not received adequate scholarly attention due to language barrier; namely, the fact that it was written in Chinese and still lacks a proper English translation.

In this paper, I begin my analysis by examining the structure and content of Foreign Cookery in relation to the norms of contemporary British and American recipe-books. It will be established that the recipes collected in Foreign Cookery predominantly and unmistakably adhere to a English middle-class discourse, which is peculiar considering Crawford’s own Alabaman upbringings. Then, I will proceed to consider the importance of such an observation and contemplate its effects on our understanding of missionary lives in China during the period. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, by speculating on the potential reasons for the 'Englishness' of Foreign Cookery, a case will be made for the importance of the interrelationship that existed between food, cultures, and missionary activities during the nineteenth century.

Biography. Isaac Yue is Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His research interest lies in the areas of Sino-British relations during the nineteenth century, East-West literary traditions, and translation studies. He has published widely on these fields in both Chinese and English and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Chinese Literary Studies and The Journal of Oriental Studies.

Senate House Library Friends Visit
Seminar
Venue: Other
Time: 13:50 - 16:00

Senate House Library Friends Visit: Wellcome Library, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.

The Wellcome Library is Europe’s largest library devoted to the history of medicine, from the earliest times to the present day. The visit will encompass a tour of the Library’s open plan areas along with a talk illustrating the range and breadth of the collections, particularly drawing upon the manuscripts and rare books. 

Meet in the ground floor foyer of the Wellcome Building at 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE  at 1.50. The tour will begin at 2.00.

NB: ALL WELCOME.  THIS VISIT IS NOT RESTRICTED TO FRIENDS MEMBERS. Places are free but limited. If you would like to attend please contact Dr Jane Darcy: j.darcy@ucl.ac.uk. Click here for other SHL Friends events.

South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Claire Chambers (Leeds Metropolitan University): 'Yusuf, Hajj, Ummah: A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English'

Open University Book History and Bibliography Seminar: Landmarks in Book History
Seminar
Venue: Room 103 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Stephen Colclough (Bangor): ' "What is the history of the history of reading?": Reinvestigating Robert Darnton's "First Steps" '
Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature and the history of the book in the School of
English at Bangor University, Wales. His publications include Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading
Communities, 1695-1870 (Palgrave, 2007) and (co-edited with Alexis Weedon) The History of the Book in
the West: 1800-1914 (Ashgate, 2010). He is a contributor to The History of Reading, Vol.3: Methods,
Strategies, Tactics (Palgrave, 2011), The Brontës in Context (CUP, 2012), and OUP's forthcoming History
of Oxford University Press edited by Simon Eliot. He is currently working on a monograph on the
representation of reading spaces in the early nineteenth century.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Ann Payne (ex-BL) and Linda Voigts (University of Missouri, Kansas City): 'Medicine for a Great Household: Berkeley Castle Muniments SB 89'

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

'Orality and Literacy'

Matthew Bevis (Oxford): 'Poetry for Laughs'
Louise Lee (KCL): 'Shattered Articulations: Darwin's Evolutionary Jokes and the Deferral of Cognition'

Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Post- Apocalypse Now.  The figure of the apocalypse retains a strong purchase on the contemporary imagination; as Zizek keeps saying, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.  Are such apocalyptic narratives necessarily post-apocalyptic? Our panel of specially invited speakers will present papers on aspects of the contemporary (post-)apocalypse: Speakers: Dr Caroline Edwards (Lincoln), Dr Monica Germana (Westminster), Dr Gill Partington (Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck). Chair: Professor Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway).

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G22/26 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:00 - 19:00

Isabel Karreman (University of Munich, Germany): 'Falstaff and lethargy'

Joe Moshenska (Trinity College, Cambridge): 'Shakespearean awkwardness: Tolstoy’s diatribe reconsidered'

London Forum for Authorship Studies
Seminar
Venue: Room 349 (SH)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Professor Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle, Australia): 'Thomas Nashe and Dido, Queen of Carthage'

New Screen Histories Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Peter Krämer (University of East Anglia): ' "The greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler": Nuclear War and the Nazi Past in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)'

With the opening of the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, it has become possible to study the production histories as well as the marketing and reception of the filmmaker’s work in great detail. Following the publication of books on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Peter Krämer (University of East Anglia) now examines the complex political resonances of one of Kubrick’s most provocative films. In particular he explores how the figure of the presidential adviser and former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove emerged during the film’s extended production process, and how this character was understood both then and later.

Open University Romantic Period Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

tbc

Open University Book History and Bibliography Seminar: Landmarks in Book History
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Bob Owens (The Open University): 'Jerome McGann's "Social Textual Criticism" and the
Editing of Literary Texts'
Bob Owens is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at The Open University. Among his publications are
scholarly editions of works by John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe, and, most recently, of The Gospels:
Authorized King James Version (Oxford World's Classics, 2010).

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London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:30 - 20:30

tbc

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid (University of Cambridge): ' "They bear names honoured forever in Ireland": The children of the Rising'

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Venue: Room 274 (Stewart House)
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

Modernism, Language, Poetry
Daniel Katz (Warwick): 'Android: Jack Spicer's Language and the Language of Modernism'
Will Montgomery (RHUL), Robert Creeley (title tbc)
NB: Room change.

Reading from the Future
Seminar
Venue: Room 274 (Stewart House)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Michael Longley

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 349 (SH)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Fr Peter Harris (Dean of Tower Hamlets): 'An English Island in Castile: the slumbering treasures of the Biblioteca of the Royal and Pontifical College of St Alban, Valladolid'

The College, founded under the patronage of Philip II in 1589, still educates English and Welsh students for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Its Biblioteca is an extraordinary survival of 9,000 vols, containing a wealth of English as well as Continental imprints. The activities of the Inquisition are also a unique aspect of the collection.

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

NB: Tuesday

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

Rupert Richard Arrowsmith (University College London): tbc.

South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University): 'Minority Literature and the South Asian Short Story'

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

tbc

UCL English Graduate Conference: Intersections
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 09:30 - 18:00

The UCL English Graduate Society invites abstracts for 20-minute papers for this year's Intersections conference. The day will be a forum for discussion of cultural and ideological exchange, both within literature and between literature and other disciplines. Proposals are invited for contributions that deal with any of the following:

Literary influence
Collaborative authorship
Interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies
Cross-cultural exchange
Polyglot studies
Interactions between authors and their readers, publishers and editors
The intersection as an image in literature

The Intersections conference aims to solicit a range of papers united by a common view of literature as built upon collaboration, influence, and interchange. Unique literary experiences occur at 'point[s] at which the world's phenomena intersect': these points might be located in the confrontation between literature and science, at a crossroads in a literary landscape, or on a page annotated by its readers.

We hope that delegates will relish this opportunity to interrogate such diverse types of intersection both with and within English literature. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION.

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Jacques Rancière in London
Lecture
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 18:00 - 16:00

Lecture: 9 March: 6.00pm: ' "Modernity" Revisited': The Beveridge Hall, followed by a wine reception.  All welcome.

Seminars: 10 March: 10am-4pm: Jacques Rancière will participate in two seminars, on `Aesthetics' (10 am -12 noon) and `Contemporary Culture' (2pm – 4pm).  Places are limited and applications are invited.  CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION.

Organised with the Humanities & Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, and with the support of the the English Department and the School of European Languages & Cultures at University College London.

Jacques Rancière's books have covered pedagogy, the writing of history, philosophy, cinema, aesthetics and contemporary art. His critics have had a hard time defining him, placing him at different points as a philosopher, a literary critic, an art theorist and a Marxist. In Jacques Rancière's words, thought is just an expression of a condition, and his work does not belong to a discipline because it belongs to an attempt to break the borders of a discipline. His translated works include : Reading Capital (1968), The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989), The Ignorant Schoolmaster; Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), The Names of History; On the Poetics of Knowledge (1994), On the Shores of Politics (1995), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), The Future of the Image (2007), Hatred of Democracy (2007), and The Aesthetic Unconscious; The Emancipated Spectator (2009.

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Venue: Room G35 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Mathematical Practitioners in Early Modern England
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (V&A): 'Mastering crafts: the mathematic text and artisanal epistemology in seventeenth-century England'
Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford): 'Confessions of a Mathematical Practitioner: Richard Norwood's Spiritual Autobiography'

NB: Room change.

Senate House Library Friends Visit
Seminar
Venue: Other
Time: 10:30

Senate House Library Friends Visit: Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE

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.
Click here for other SHL Friends events.

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Natalie Galustian, Justin Croft, and others: 'Book Collecting and the Web'.

The second in the new series of seminars organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies (London University) and the ABA Educational Trust will take the form of a round-table discussion given by some of the younger, more articulate and more digitally-savvy members of the rare book trade - Natalie Galustian, Justin Croft, Simon Beattie and Jonathan Kearns.  Topics included will be the best (and worst) places to look for books on the internet, the merit and trustworthiness of internet descriptions, what we are really being told, the bonuses as well as the perils and pitfalls of instant collecting gratification, the skills of searching, what the apparently transparent market is actually telling us, and the explosion of social media marketing - blogs, facebook, twitter and all the rest. Natalie Galustian can be found at Natalie Galustian Rare Books , Justin Croft at Justin Croft Antiquarian Books, Simon Beattie at Simon Beattie, and Jonathan Kearns here on his blog for Adrian Harrington Rare Books - Bibliodeviancy.

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Elizabeth Archibald (University of Bristol)

Open University Romantic Period Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 103 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

tbc

London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Elton Barker (Open University) and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton): 'Discovering and using ancient place data'

John Coffin Memorial Annual Palaeography Lecture
University Trust Fund Event
Venue: The Chancellor's Hall (Senate House, First Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:00

'Inscribed images and inspired scribes' by Dr Jennifer O'Reilly, FSA (University College Cork)

Dr. Jennifer O'Reilly is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.  Her research interests include:  1. The transformation of the inheritance of Late Antiquity in the early medieval West, particularly in Irish and Anglo-Saxon monastic culture, including: ideas of Rome and Jerusalem, the centre and the periphery; the literature of conversion and pilgrimage; patristic and Insular biblical exegesis and hagiography; the work of Adomnán and Bede; the Book of Kells and the art of the Insular Gospel-books.  2. Issues of text and image and various iconographic themes in Early Christian, medieval and Renaissance art, including: aspects of the Incarnation and Passion; the Tree of Life; Virtues and Vices; symbolic architecture, maps, diagrams and images of divine order and inner journeys; scribal, author and donor portraits.

Recent Publications include: ‘Bede on seeing the God of gods in Zion ’, in Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (ed), Text, image and interpretation. Studies in Anglo-Saxon liturature and its Insular context in honour of Éamonn ÓCarragáin (Brepols, Turnhout 2007) .  ‘Two pages from the Book of Kells’, in James Elkins (ed), Visual practices across the University (Munich 2007).  ‘Signs of the Cross. Medieval religious images and the interpretation of Scripture’, chapter commissioned for T.Ayers (ed),  The History of British art, 600-1600  (Tate Britain and the Yale Center for British Art 2008) .  ‘“All that Peter stands for”. The romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus reconsidered’, in James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan (ed), Anglo-Saxon/Irish relations before the Vikings, Proceedings of the British Academy157 (Oxford 2009).

Free and open to the public, and followed by a wine reception. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington, Institute of English Studies: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk ; tel +44 (0)207 664 4859.

Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:00 - 19:00

Text:
Bollas, Hysteria; Henry James, The Wings of the Dove.

Commentator: Nicola Diamond (University of East London and Psychoanalytic- Psychotherapist)

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 11:00 - 17:00

'Orality and Literacy'

Jason Camlot (Concordia) on early literary recordings and digital analysis James Mussell (Birmingham) on nineteenth- and twenty-first-century media and digital literacy

Claire Potter (U Paris Diderot): 'The Weight of the Voice/The Slant of the Word: Circulations of Melancholia in Hardy'

Roisin Quinn-Lautrefin (U Paris Diderot): 'Giving Utterance: Mary Barton and the Language of the Working Class'

Mary L. Shannon (KCL): 'Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and the London Riots, 1848'

Sandra M. Gustafson (Notre Dame) on public speech and nonviolence in the nineteenth-century United States

London Shakespeare Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:00 - 19:00

Lukas Erne (University of Geneva, Switzerland):  'Shakespeare, Publication and the London Book Trade'

Alice Hunt (University of Southampton): 'Ceremony and Entertainment at the Coronation of James I'

Literary London Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 104 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

We are very pleased to announce that the Literary London Reading Group (formerly the Literary London Seminar) has resumed. Writer and environmentalist Ken Worpole has kindly agreed to introduce our first session in which we will be having a butchers hook (sorry) at the figure of the gangster in literary imaginings of the East End. Using Alexander Baron's King Dido (1969), and Iain Sinclair's depiction of Ronnie Kray's funeral in Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as our points of departure, we will examine how these writers engage with and complicate a reading of the gangster as a figure of authority governing the 'anarchic' provinces of London's slumland. 

If you would like to attend this session then we would be very grateful if you could contact us at literarylondonrg@gmail.com and register your interest.

Ken Worpole is the author of a number of books on architecture, landscape and social history, including Last Landscapes and Here Comes the Sun. He is a Senior Professor at The Cities Institute at London Metropolitan University, and writes regularly for the Guardian, Prospect, Times Higher Education Supplement and many other publications.  Ken has written a highly informative introduction for the Fives Leaves edition of King Dido, which is available to purchase from the Inpress Books website for £9.99. The relevant extract from Lights Out for the Territory can be downloaded here.

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes): 'The Case of Florence Marryat: Custodian of the Spirit World/Popular Novelist'

This paper focuses on Florence Marryat, a figure active on the stage, in the séance room and in the literary circles of her time. By reading Marryat's spiritualist memoirs, There is No Death and The Spirit World, as hybrids between life-writing and the gothic, I show that for Marryat, spiritualist investigation was not devoid of literary flourishing and could often lead to debates between her readers as to whether she was writing fiction or statements of fact. Marryat's melodramatic accounts, her advice on séance settings, her literary style of drawing the audience into her confidence, reflect the porousness of boundaries between Marryat's many careers and her beliefs but most importantly, accentuate the ways that spiritualism, whether believed in or doubted, had seeped into the lives, practices and customs of the Victorians.

Biography: Tatiana Kontou is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Spiritualism and Women's Writing: from the fin de siecle to the neo-Victorian and editor of Women and the Victorian Occult. She has recently co-edited with Sarah Willburn The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult and is currently writing a monograph titled 'Her Father's Name': Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat's Fiction.

The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium
Conference / Symposium
Venue: to be confirmed
Time: 14:30 - 19:30

The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts and interested members of the public, an interaction that promises to be highly informative and enjoyable for everyone involved.  This year the focus will be on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and the beginnings of their culture.  CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS.

South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Minoli Salgado (University of Sussex): (title to be finalised) ‘In Terror: Trespass and the Writer as Witness-Traveler’)

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 103 (Senate House, 1st Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

tbc

Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: to be confirmed
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Rosalind McKever (Kingston University and the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art): ' "The Present is Art": Vorticist and Futurist Temporalities'

In 1914 Vorticism defined itself in part through a denunciation of ‘backwards’ Futurism. The Futurists had done much the same in the manifestos of 1909 and 1910 which repudiated their passatista contemporaries. Despite Marinetti’s fondness for the metropolis of London, the Italians hit back in the same year as the publication of Blast I by highlighting the traditionalism of the city’s art. In short, both movements believed the other to be passéist.

On the other hand, they both believed their own movements to be of their time. The present is often lauded on the pages of Blast. While the Futurists may initial appear predominantly concerned with the future, Lewis’s critique of them, and my close reading, agree that they are, above all, presentists. Lewis is able to both claim their presentism and denounce their passéism as he considers their Milanese present to be behind that of London. However, the preoccupation with the primitive expressed by both movements suggests a desire to withdraw from the modern temporality of the post-industrial revolution city altogether.

Drawing on the writings of the Lewis, Pound, Marinetti, Boccioni and Severini, the artwork produced by the two movements, and the wider temporalities of London and Milan in the period 1909-1915, I look to reconsider how these to avant-gardes related to their times, and to time itself. Through assessing the temporality of each movement through its critique of the other I will focus on their shared antipassatismo, presentism and atemporality with the ultimate aim of nuancing the temporality of the rubric of avant-gardism which both movements share.

London Theatre Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:30 - 20:30

tbc

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

The Rise of Creative Writing
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Impacts on the Novel

Professor Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives.  She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has spent most of her adult life in England.  A professor at the University of Warwick, she writes frequently in the British press on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.  She is perhaps best known for her translations of five books by the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk and for her campaigning journalism after he and many other writers, scholars and activists were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness or the memory of Ataturk.  Her sixth novel, Enlightenment, was published in 2007.  Like her work-in-progress, it is set in Istanbul.

Andrew Cowan is Director of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of five novels: Pig, which won several literary prizes including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Common Ground, Crustaceans, What I Know, which received an Arts Council Writer’s Award, and Worthless Men, which will be published by Sceptre in spring 2013.  His Creative Writing guidebook, The Art of Writing Fiction, was published by Pearson Longman last year. 

Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Dr Kim Akass (Hertfordshire) and Dr Janet McCabe (Birkbeck): 'The HBO Phenomenon'

Irish Studies Seminars
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Mary Hickman (London Metropolitan University): 'Social Cohesion and the notion of "suspect communities": comparing Irish and Muslim experiences in Britain'

Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Susan Rudy (LSE): tbc

Reading from the Future
Seminar
Venue: Room 274 (Stewart House)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Jo Shapcott

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History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Elizabeth Evenden (Newnham College, Cambridge): 'Selectivity and Survival: Matthew Parker and the Role of the Codex in Early Modern England'?

This paper will discuss Matthew Parker’s great searching out of manuscripts and the fate of these manuscripts once they came into the Archbishop’s hands. It is the story of the selection, the survival, and the loss of texts from the great libraries of pre-Reformation England, and of books saved, moulded and created to form the history of the English nation and the English Church.

Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

NB: Tuesday

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Current Research on Jan Baptista Van Helmont
Sietske Fransen (Warburg Institute): 'Jan Baptista van Helmont and the power of words'
Jo Hedesan (University of Exeter): 'Alchemy and Light Theory in the Work of Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644)'

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Valerie Jackson-Harris: 'Collecting ephemera'.

The third 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 one of the most experienced and knowledgeable dealers in the area of printed ephemera, Valerie Jackson-Harris, Chairman of the Ephemera Society. Trading as Quadrille, Valerie has been dealing in ephemera for over thirty five years. Her expertise has enabled museums, libraries and private collectors around the world to acquire rare and difficult to find items to complement their collections.  To quote from the Ephemera Society's website (www.ephemera-society.org.uk), "The term 'ephemera' covers a wide range of documents including leaflets, handbills, tickets, trade-cards, programmes and playbills, printed tins and packaging, advertising inserts, posters, newspapers and much more. In the words of the society’s founder, Maurice Rickards, “the minor transient documents of everyday life”. Valerie's website can be found here at www.quadrille-ephemera.com - and for a sneak preview of the seminar, try this clip uploaded by the Ephemera Society to YouTube - English Paper Ephemera.  

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture 2011-2012
University Trust Fund Event
Venue: The Chancellor's Hall (Senate House, First Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:00

James Shapiro (Columbia University): 'Unravelling Shakespeare's Life'

Cradle-to-grave biographies of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century have steadily drifted toward fiction and toward reading the life out of the works.  James Shapiro unravels the writing of Shakespeare’s life over the past two centuries in an effort to understand when and why these trends have occurred, what price we pay for this biographical tradition, and what alternative approaches might offer.

James Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985.  He the author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991), Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (2000), 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), which was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book published in Britain, and Contested Will (2010), which was awarded the Theater Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Award. He also works with a number of theater companies, including Theatre for a New Audience and the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Senate House Library Friends
Lecture
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Talk by James Shapiro.  tbc.

Literary London Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

tbc

Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Dr Joe Brooker (Birkbeck): 'Money: The Reckoning'. Session to mark the launch of a special issue of Textual Practice on Martin Amis' Money.

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History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 349 (SH)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Dr Karen Attar (Senate House Library): 'The University of London Library during the Second World War'.

While London's Senate House is best known for the period 1939-1945 as the home of the Ministry of Information, the University of London Library continued to operate there. This paper describes its operations during the war years, from regular library activity such as acquisitions to wartime precautions, air raids, and its relations with the Ministry.

The Rise of Creative Writing
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

tbc.  Poetry.

Senate House Library Friends
Lecture
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Peter Mack (Warburg Institute): 'Print and Innovation in Sixteenth Century Rhetoric: Agricola, Erasmus and Melanchthon'

Attendance free, all welcome.  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.

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Reading from the Future
Seminar
Venue: Room G35 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Don Paterson

NB: Room change.

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Edward Baynton-Coward: 'Collecting Bindings'

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

Ellen McWilliams (Bath Spa University): 'The "Creative Migrant" in Colm Toibin's The South'

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Alexander Howard (University of Sussex): Canto 105

Modernism Research Seminar Series
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

Modernism and Affect
Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough): 'From Normative Unhappiness to Non-Normative Bliss: Modernist Intimacies in Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson'
Kate McLoughlin: 'Ford Madox Ford, Telephones and Interruption'

Senate House Library Friends
Lecture
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Carlos Galvis (Institute of Historical Research): 'Transport collections in the Goldsmiths Library.

Attendance free, all welcome.  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.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Mark Stansbury (National University of Ireland, Galway): 'Some thoughts on the origins of Insular Script'

John Coffin Memorial Irish Studies Lecture
University Trust Fund Event
Venue: The Chancellor's Hall (Senate House, First Floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:00

'Samuel Beckett: Mystic' by Professor Declan Kiberd (University College Dublin)

Declan Kiberd joined UCD as lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature in 1979, having taught English previously in the University of Kent at Canterbury (1976-7), and Irish in Trinity College Dublin (1977-9). He was appointed Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD in 1997. He has also been Director of the Yeats International Summer School (1985-7), Patron of the Dublin Shaw Society (1995-2000), a columnist with the Irish Times (1985-7) and the Irish Press (1987-93), the presenter of the RTE Arts programme, Exhibit A (1984-6), and a regular essayist and reviewer in the Irish Times, TLS, London Review of Books and the New York Times.

Free and open to the public, and followed by a wine reception. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington, Institute of English Studies: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk ; tel +44 (0)207 664 4859.

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Thomas Roebuck (Magdalen College, Oxford): 'Forms of Antiquarianism in the Early Royal Society'

Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: to be confirmed
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Nathan Waddell (University of Birmingham)

Literary London Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

tbc

Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 12:30 - 14:00

William Radice (SOAS): tbc

Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
Lecture
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, led by Professor Michael Slater

Attendance free, all welcome.  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.

Visions: Sixth International Conference of Iconographic Studies
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Other
Time: 00:00

At the University of Rijeka, Croatia.

This conference seeks to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue as well as to continue the cycle of sessions for scholarly discourse on significant subjects in iconographic studies. The conference presentations will deal with different subjects concerning “visions” with an emphasis upon the relation between mysticism and art in the European Middle Ages (other periods in Art history are included as well). CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: www.ffri.hr/pu/ikon

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Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Seminar
Venue: Room 261 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 17:00 - 19:00

Text:
Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (1989). pp. 711-87 and 109-111

Film:
Lawrence of Arabia (Dir. David Lean, 1962)

Commentator: Steve Pile (Open University)

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Medieval Arabic and Latin Alchemy
Stephanie Seavers (University College, London): 'Medieval alchemy and the symbolism of gold'
Gabriele Ferrario (Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, University of Cambridge): 'The pigment that came from overseas: Ultramarine blue in Medieval Arabic Alchemy'

Reading from the Future
Seminar
Venue: Room 274 (Stewart House)
Time: 14:00 - 16:00

Gillian Clarke

Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
Lecture
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Two stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (‘The Empty House’ and ‘The Adventures of the Speckled Band’), led by Dr. Emelyne Godfrey

Attendance free, all welcome.  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.

Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Tadashi Kotake (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, IES Visiting Fellow): 'Old English Glosses to the Rushworth Gospels: Palaeographical, Textual and Linguistic Approaches'

London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 11:00 - 16:00

tbc

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

Dr. David Shaw (Canterbury): 'Interpreting the Benefactors’ Book: a documentary and bibliographical account of Canterbury Cathedral Library in the seventeenth century'.

The Catalogus Benefactorum, established in 1628 to record the names of donors to the Cathedral Library, is a confusing and incomplete document. Other library records exist from the 17th century which help give a fuller picture of the growth of the library, including the confiscation of the collections and the demolition of the library building in the Commonwealth period, and its re-establishment in the 1660s.

This meeting will be held in the Guard Room at Lambeth Palace. Intending visitors are asked to contact in advance mary.comer@churchofengland.org.

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Paul Goldman: 'Collecting Pre-Raphaelite Books and Illustration'

Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
Lecture
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

The Thirty Nine Steps, by John Buchan, led by Dr Kate Macdonald

Attendance free, all welcome.  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.

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

London Palaeography Summer School
Summer School
Venue: Senate House
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Speakers:

Dr Michelle Brown, Dr Marigold Norbye (UCL), Professor Charles Burnett (Warburg), Mr Peter Kidd, Prof. Anthony Edwards (De Montfort University), Dr Carol Farr, Dr Annaclara Cataldi Palau (Royal Holloway, University of London), Miss Elizabeth Danbury (UCL), Dr Nigel Ramsay (UCL), Dr Debby Banham (Birkbeck and Cambridge), Dr Jenny Stratford (IHR), Dr Rowan Watson (V&A),  Ms Patricia Lovett (Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society), Dr Wim van Mierlo (IES), Dr James Willoughby (New College, Oxford), Dr Anna Somfai (Central European University), Dr Dorothea McEwan (Warburg Institute) and Dr Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute). 

The London Palaeography Summer School is a series of intensive courses in Palaeography and Diplomatic. Courses range from a half to two days duration and are given by experts in their respective fields from a wide range of institutions. Subject areas include Latin palaeography, English, German and Greek palaeography,  history of scripts, illuminated manuscripts, vernacular editing and liturgical and devotional manuscripts.

The Summer School is hosted by the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies with the co-operation of the British Library, the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society, the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Library, the Warburg Institute, University College, King's College London and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Full course descriptions and application forms

Literary London Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

tbc

London Rare Books School (week one)
Summer School
Venue: Senate House
Time: 10:30 - 15:30
Speakers:

Brian Alderson, Peter Barber Geoffrey Beare, Professor Michelle P. Brown, Alan Cole (Curator of the Museum of Writing), Dr Catherine Delano-Smith, Professor Anthony Edwards, Professor John Feather, Dr Irving Finkel, Jean Hedger, Dr Matthew Nicholls, Dr Marigold Norbye, Professor Nicholas Pickwoad, Dr. Kathryn E. Piquette, Jill Shefrin, Sarah Tyacke, Dr Rowan Watson, Laurence Worms.

A series of five-day, intensive courses on a variety of book-related subjects to be taught in and around Senate House, which is the centre of the University of London's federal system. The courses will be taught by internationally renowned scholars associated with the Institute's Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, using the unrivalled library and museum resources of London, including the British Library, the British Museum , the Victoria and Albert Museum, the University of London Research Library Services, and many more. All courses will stress the materiality of the book so you can expect to have close encounters with remarkable books and other artefacts from some of the world's greatest collections. Each class will be restricted to a maximum of twelve students in order to ensure that everyone has plenty of opportunity to talk to the teachers and to get very close to the books.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION AND APPLICATION.

The Power of the Word: Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

The second Power of the Word conference focuses on the theme of poetry and prayer. It seeks to promote further the dialogue, begun successfully at Heythrop College in last June's conference, between theologians, philosophers, literary scholars and creative writers about the following questions: What do poetry and prayer share? How do they differ? In what ways do they relate to each other? The conference, interdisciplinary and ecumenical in scope, encourages theoretical discussion as well as analysis of specific texts and reflection on the work of particular authors, poets and thinkers of different countries and religious traditions.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Richard Parker: Canto 35

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 264 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

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London Rare Books School (week two)
Summer School
Venue: Senate House
Time: 10:30 - 15:30
Speakers:

David Chambers, Alan Cole, John Barnard, Michelle Brown, Paul Goldman, Anthony Hamber, Arnold Hunt, Elizabeth James, Giles Mandelbrote, Angela McShane, Angus O'Neill, Nigel Roche, Julian Rota, Iain Stevenson,
Julia Walworth, Rowan Watson, Laurence Worms

A series of five-day, intensive courses on a variety of book-related subjects to be taught in and around Senate House, which is the centre of the University of London's federal system. The courses will be taught by internationally renowned scholars associated with the Institute's Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, using the unrivalled library and museum resources of London, including the British Library, the British Museum , the Victoria and Albert Museum, the University of London Research Library Services, and many more. All courses will stress the materiality of the book so you can expect to have close encounters with remarkable books and other artefacts from some of the world's greatest collections. Each class will be restricted to a maximum of twelve students in order to ensure that everyone has plenty of opportunity to talk to the teachers and to get very close to the books.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION AND APPLICATION.

History of Libraries Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 349 (SH)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30

Professor Alistair Black (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): ' "The necessity of clear expression": home-grown writing, organisational learning and the library staff magazine in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century'.

Unlike staff magazines in private enterprises, which pre-date them by two decades, library staff magazines of the early-twentieth century were more truly the product of employees, operated as they often were by staff associations. The library staff magazine provided opportunities for employees to write – as a pastime, as a form of organizational learning and networking, as a contribution to labour solidarity, and, finally, as a vehicle for personal professional advance and identity formation, though one which contained an element of “othering,” of the public as well as junior and female staff.

Literary London Conference 2012
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers, comprised panels, and roundtable sessions, which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city's roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating film, architecture, geography, theories of urban space, etc., to literary representations of London. Papers from postgraduate students are particularly welcome for consideration. While papers on all areas of literary London are welcomed, the conference theme in 2012 is 'Sports, Games, and Pastimes'.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Reading from the Future
Seminar
Venue: Room 274/275 (Stewart House, Second floor)
Time: 10:00 - 18:00

Symposium

Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

Organised and sponsored by the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Linguistics and The Journal of Philology. The conference is devoted to the development of English and Russian studies, lexicography, sociolinguistics, English teaching in Russia, and the History of the Book. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Carl Williams: 'Collecting Counter-Culture'

The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Room 265 (Senate House, second floor)
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

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Dante in the Nineteenth Century
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

As a number of historians have pointed out, the concept of the 'Renaissance' as a way of describing Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries is essentially a nineteenth century idea. We look at medieval and early modern Italy through nineteenth-century spectacles. Indeed, the anglophone cult of Dante – in commentaries, translations, illustrations, and a host of literary references – belongs to this nineteenth century matrix. This conference aims to bring together literary critics (both English and Italian), historians, and art historians, with scholars from similar disciplines specializing in the nineteenth century.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Space and Place in Middlebrow: 1900-1950
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

This conference aims to investigate the complex relationship between middlebrow writing and categories of space and place. For the exploration of this topic we seek to encourage discussion along two main trajectories: firstly, we would like to invite participants to consider the spaces and places where middlebrow writing was supported. This includes the social geographies of middlebrow as well as the topography and archaeology of middlebrow production and consumption. We are interested in hearing about research on middlebrow culture that encompasses spaces of refuge, spaces of social power, and spaces of industry and production. We want to hear about loci for writing: areas in a country, a county, a town, a village, even of a building. Where did middlebrow happen?

Secondly, we invite papers that explore the literary representation of place and space in middlebrow writing. Participants are invited to discuss contribution of middlebrow writers to the spatial discourses that harbour the collective's sense of national, cultural and social identity. How do middlebrow writers image the places of gender, ethnicity, and class? What are their strategies for the appropriation of space and place for generating cultural meaning? We are particularly interested to learn about the experience of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and middlebrow conceptions of home and exile, the country and city, the centre and the margins. How does middlebrow reflect and negotiate the spatial practices of society?  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

First International Djuna Barnes Conference
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

The work of author, poet, playwright, journalist, visual artist and sometimes reluctant modernist Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982) has continued to beguile, excite and inspire readers and has, over the years, produced its own voluminous and varied critical history. While Barnes has often been treated as a somewhat peripheral figure in relation to modernism, recent studies, graduate research activity, and research focused on questions of literary history and modernism continues to reveal a deepening body of research that increasingly values Barnes's importance as a central modern writer.

The First International Djuna Barnes Conference presents itself as a timely opportunity to reflect upon this complex critical history history and consider the shape and scope of Barnes scholarship and twentieth century literary studies today. International and interdisciplinary in focus, this conference hopes to reflect the diversity of Barnes's own art practice, cohering a diverse and dispersed research community of scholars and postgraduate students interested in Barnes either directly, tangentially, or in relation to other frames of cultural-historical studies which might open up further possibilities for investigation and discussion.

CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: Modernism and the First World War
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

Proposals are invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford's First World War tetralogy, Parade's End . First published as Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up– (1926) and Last Post (1928), Parade's End has been described by Anthony Burgess as ‘the finest novel about the First World War', by Samuel Hynes as ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman', and by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘a central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary'. In 2010–11, Carcanet published the volumes as major critical editions, providing for the first time reliable texts, detailed annotations and discussions of the textual histories. Also in 2011, the BBC and HBO embarked on a five-part adaptation, scripted by Sir Tom Stoppard. As we approach the centenary of the start of the Great War, this conference will examine and celebrate Ford's First World War modernist masterpiece.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: http://fordmadoxford-conference.weebly.com

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Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Julian Browning: 'Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts'

Cosmopolitan Animals
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

Keynote speakers: Donna Haraway / Simon Glendinning

In what ways can we conceptualise cosmopolitanisms which are not solely 'human', and where and how are such relationships made possible? This conference, under the theme of 'Cosmopolitan Animals', seeks to interrogate and decentre humanist metanarratives that have dominated our thinking and ways of living, while looking to the many non-human others who populate the cosmos.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/cosmopolitan-animals.html

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South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

The South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations One-Day Symposium seeks to address emerging contexts and formal departures in South-Asian Anglophone fiction and, in the process, interrogate established critical and theoretical assumptions about this rapidly evolving body of writing. The conference will allow critics and scholars of South-Asian fiction to exchange ideas, challenge current paradigms in postcolonial studies, and map new areas of importance, especially where these involve recent economic and political developments in the region. CLICK HER FOR CALL FOR PAPERS

Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Jolyon Hudson: 'Book Collecting: The Financial Nuts and Bolts'

Wyndham Lewis: Networks, Dialogues and Communities
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

This conference's remit is to explore the numerous ways in which the modernist writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) belonged to cultural networks of influence and inheritance.  Dedicated Lewis scholarship has, during the past decade, shown how key a part Lewis played in various communities of his time (e.g. the early twentieth-century avant-garde, ‘little magazine' culture, and modernist sociality), as well as how many important contributions he made to an impressive variety of intellectual traditions and critical practices (e.g. ethnology, political theorizing, Semitism, Bergsonism, cinema scholarship, nihilism, and postmodernism, among others).

In all this, Lewis was a profoundly dialogic thinker; his writings are suffused with quotations of, and references to, other figures (from previous eras as well as his own). This aspect of Lewis's writing forces responsible accounts of his significance to take into consideration the numerous ways in which Lewis positioned himself as a relational thinker and creator, not to mention the complexities of the lines of influence upon subsequent generations to which his creative energies gave rise. As a result, the conference calls for papers which take as their focus the dialogic, collective, and interpersonal sides of Lewis's oeuvre – in words as much as in paint. All topics will be considered.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

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Book Collecting Research Seminar
Seminar
Venue: Durning-Lawrence Room
Time: 18:00 - 19:30

Roger Gaskell: 'Science, Illustration and the Royal Society'

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Writers and their Libraries
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 00:00

This conference in the History of Reading will bring together scholars working on the private libraries of some of the major literary figures in world literature. The aim of the conference is to explore reading habits, note-taking practices, marginalia and other traces of reading experience and book collecting in a comparative context. At the same time, the conference will offer a forum for the discussion of theories and methodologies that underpin this kind of research, as well as the problems and challenges of reclaiming, representing and editing the evidence of reading writers and writing readers from the archive.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Jane Austen Society 2012: Jane Austen's Men
Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Time: 09:30 - 17:30

Rescheduled from 2012.