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16 May 2012 |
The Dean's Seminar
Professor Robert L. Patten (Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies and Lynette S. Autry Professor in Humanities, Rice University): 'Branding Authorship: The Advantages of Anonymity'. Anonymity and pseudonymity have been discussed extensively as authorial options. But what advantages are there in marketing a work while concealing the creator's real name? And can pseudonyms rebel against their inventors. The case of "Boz" raises these questions dramatically. Chaired by the Dean of the School, Professor Roger Kain. A sandwich lunch will be provided.
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16 May 2012 |
Senate House Library Friends
Carlos Galvis (Institute of Historical Research): 'Following the traces of the London and Paris railways: the Transport holdings of the Goldsmiths' Library' To historians and contemporaries alike the transformation that London and Paris experienced during the nineteenth century as a result of the building of railways was unprecedented. But what other histories can we trace when we enter the world of the Goldsmiths' Library? The talk will attempt to give a provisional answer by expanding the horizon of London and Paris to remote geographies, longer histories and other means of transport. 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.
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16 May 2012 |
Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Professor Catherine Belsey (Swansea): 'Dangerous Dead Women and the Practice of Criticism'. From the Icelandic sagas to The Woman in Black, women may prove more menacing in death than they were permitted to be in life. Are ghost stories concerning the malevolent return of the oppressed best read as evidence of misgivings on the part of a misogynist culture? Or is a deeper anxiety perceptible? And how far are current critical practices open to a genre of fiction that registers a sense of something beyond what culture gives us to know?
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17 May 2012 |
Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Mark Stansbury (National University of Ireland, Galway): 'Some thoughts on the origins of Insular Script'
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17 May 2012 |
John Coffin Memorial Irish Studies Lecture
'Samuel Beckett - Mystic' by Professor Declan Kiberd (University of Notre Dame) A lecture exploring the problem of pain, authorship and godhead in Beckett's Murphy, Waiting for Godot, and The Unnameable. Declan Kiberd is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, at the English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. Previously, he was chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin (UCD). In 1979 Declan Kiberd joined UCD as lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature, 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.
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17 May 2012 |
John Coffin Memorial Irish Studies Lecture
'Samuel Beckett - Mystic' by Professor Declan Kiberd (University of Notre Dame) A lecture exploring the problem of pain, authorship and godhead in Beckett's Murphy, Waiting for Godot, and The Unnameable. Declan Kiberd is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, at the English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. Previously, he was chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin (UCD). In 1979 Declan Kiberd joined UCD as lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature, 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.
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18 May 2012 |
Insular Manuscripts Master Class
Professor Michelle Brown (Institute of English Studies) The Institute of English Studies will be holding a one-day master class on Insular Manuscripts on Friday 18th May. This course is run on behalf of the School of Advanced Study (SAS). The course will cover the origins of Insular manuscripts; the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells and Southumbrian manuscripts. It is suitable for MA, MRes, MPhil and PhD students and is also open to professional and other participants. Places will be awarded on a first-come first-serve basis.
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18 May 2012 |
Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Alexander Howard (University of Sussex): Canto 105
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18 May 2012 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
from p. 89, line 754: `Tell her a ghost story....'
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19 May 2012 |
EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Thomas Roebuck (Magdalen College, Oxford): 'Antiquarianism in Soho: History and Scholarship in the circle of Thomas Smith (1638-1710)'
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22 May 2012 |
Wyndham Lewis Reading Group
Nathan Waddell (University of Birmingham): 'Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the Postwar-to-end-war World'
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22 May 2012 |
Literary London Reading Group
Brycchan Carey (Kingston) introducing 'Ignatius Sancho: An Eighteenth-Century African in London.'
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23 May 2012 |
Institute of English Studies Director's Seminar
William Radice (Research Associate, SOAS): 'Yeats's impact on Gitanjali'
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23 May 2012 |
London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Elizabeth Archibald (University of Bristol): ' "Baths of Bliss": Bathing Practices in Medieval Literature and Society'
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23 May 2012 |
Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
cancelled
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23 May 2012 |
Contemporary Fiction / Literary and Critical Theory Joint Seminar
"Theory Shaping Fiction | Fiction Shaping Theory" A panel on research into the intersections of critical and creative interventions in 21st Century Fiction, co-organised by the Contemporary Fiction Seminar and the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar. For more information/to register E: contemporaryfictionseminar@gmail.com | E: 21stcenturytheory@googlemail.com | Twitter: @contemporaryfic
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25 May 2012 |
Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar
Poetry, Parapoetics and Architecture: Karen Mac Cormack (SUNY) is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Quirks & Quillets (1991), At Issue (2001), and Implexures (2003). Her most recent book is Tale Light: New and Selected Poems (2010). Steve McCaffery, David Gray Professor at SUNY at Buffalo, was part of the Canadian sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen and, since Carnival (1967-75) has published numerous volumes of poetry, including Theory of Sediment (1991), The Cheat of Words (1996), and Seven Pages Missing (2000). His critical works include a collection of essays, North of intention (1986) and Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (2001).
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29 May 2012 |
New Screen Histories Seminar
Dina Iordanova (University of St. Andrews), tbc
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30 May - 01 June 2012 |
Visions: Sixth International Conference of Iconographic Studies
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). Conference website: www.ffri.hr/pu/ikon
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30 May 2012 |
Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
Professor Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths)
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01 June 2012 |
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice
Text: Commentator: Steve Pile (Open University)
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01 June 2012 |
Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
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02 June 2012 |
EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination)
Medieval Arabic and Latin Alchemy
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02 June 2012 |
The Future of Poetry
Gillian Clarke’s poetry collection: A Recipe for Water: a consideration. Gillian Clarke (b. 1937) is one of the central figures in contemporary Welsh poetry, the third to take up the post of National Poet of Wales. Her poems have achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim (her Selected Poems has gone through seven printings and her work is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain). Although Clarke's poems are full of the here-and-now, they are also haunted by many different kinds of past. However, it's the fate of the women of living memory that is her most persistent theme. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world. In our examination of her latest collection, we will be exploring the personal and elemental dimensions that support her work, the nature of ‘regionalism’ and the question of female voice and identity. Why not join us for the last in this series of informal but enlightening discussions? All welcome.
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06 June 2012 |
Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
Two stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ and ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’), led by Dr. Emelyne Godfrey, freelance writer, author of Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Palgrave, 2010). In these stories, Conan Doyle’s great detective grapples with some slippery enemies, not least because the criminals he faces have the outward appearance of being gentlemen. This reading group discussion will explore the role of the nemesis as a hook in bestselling fiction and will consider some of the fears that Conan Doyle’s genteel villains represent, such as the threat of foreign violence and the disintegration of the self. In the process, we will be investigating related themes, including the use of physiognomy to portray character and the ideal of manliness. One major topic will be physical culture at the turn of the century: indeed Holmes’s greatest weapon against his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, is arguably his knowledge of a martial art, ‘bar[t]itsu’, which is attracting growing academic interest. 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.
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06 June 2012 |
Medieval and Renaissance Close Reading Group
tbc
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07 June 2012 |
Medieval Manuscripts Seminar
Tadashi Kotake (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, IES Visiting Fellow): 'Old English Glosses to the Rushworth Gospels: Palaeographical, Textual and Linguistic Approaches'
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09 June 2012 |
London Nineteenth Century Studies Research Seminar
Victorian Maritime: a Symposium. The University of London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar with the Centre for Victorian Studies, Royal Holloway Tim Armstrong: 'Ship and Shore: Life Saving as Spectacle in the Long Nineteenth Century' Confirmed respondents: Anyaa Anim-Adoo, Matthew Rubery, Vanessa Smith For further information regarding the programme please contact Ruth Livesey via ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk
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12 June 2012 |
History of Libraries Research Seminar
Dr. David Shaw (Canterbury): 'Interpreting the Benefactors’ Book: a documentary and bibliographical account of Canterbury Cathedral Library in the seventeenth century'. This meeting will be held in the Guard Room at Lambeth Palace. Intending visitors are asked to contact in advance mary.comer@churchofengland.org.
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12 June 2012 |
Book Collecting Research Seminar
Paul Goldman: 'Collecting Pre-Raphaelite Books and Illustration'
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12 June 2012 |
Senate House Library Friends Book Talk
The Thirty Nine Steps, by John Buchan, led by Dr Kate Macdonald
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13 June 2012 |
London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS)
Rob Ellis (QMUL) and Carl Kears (KCL)
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15 June 2012 |
The UCL Festival of London and Literature: "One Day in the City"
“One Day in the City” is a celebration of London and Literature organised by the Department of English, at University College London. The day and evening is free to the general public and is a rare opportunity to listen to and share thoughts with authors, poets, and academics in all things London. At a time when student fees are rising and funding is being slashed in Arts and Humanities faculties across the UK, this day will demonstrate, on a practical and visceral level, the importance of creativity and its non-quantifiable value within the city. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.
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15 June 2012 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
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16 June 2012 |
Irish Studies Symposium: Censored Ireland
Speakers include: Donal O'Drisceoil, Maurice Walsh, Peter Martin, Lauren Arrington, Ben Levitas, Steve Nicholson, Catherine O'Leary, Niall Carson, Frank Shovlin, David Rockett, David Nash, Richard West. Lunch will be provided. Free and open to all. If you would like to attend please email IESEvents@sas.ac.uk by 11 June.
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18 - 22 June 2012 |
London Palaeography Summer School
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
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19 June 2012 |
Literary London Reading Group
tbc
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22 June 2012 |
Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group
Richard Parker: Canto 35
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25 - 29 June 2012 |
London Rare Books School (week one)
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.
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29 - 30 June 2012 |
The Power of the Word: Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities
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 FURTHER DETAILS.
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29 June 2012 |
Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
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30 June 2012 |
Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar
Special seminar to launch the publication of the anthology Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition edited by Dr. Matt Green (Nottingham)
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02 - 06 July 2012 |
London Rare Books School (week two)
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, 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.
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03 July 2012 |
History of Libraries Research Seminar
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.
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04 July 2012 |
Literary London Conference 2012
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.
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07 July 2012 |
The Future of Poetry
Symposium
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07 - 15 July 2012 |
T.S. Eliot International Summer School
Anthony Cuda (University of North Carolina Greensboro), Frances Dickey (University of Missouri), Manju Jain (University of Delhi), Jim McCue (Institute of English Studies), John Morgenstern (Oxford), Paul Muldoon (Princeton), Sean O'Brien (University of Newcastle), Stephen Regan (University of Durham), Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia), John Paul Riquelme (Boston University), Ronald Schuchard (Emory University), Hannah Sullivan (Oxford), and Wim Van Mierlo (Institute of English Studies). The Institute of English Studies, University of London is hosting the fourth annual T.S. Eliot International Summer School (7-14 July). Anyone with an interest in the greatest of all modernist poets is welcome to participate in this week-long celebration of Eliot's life and writing led by some of the most eminent scholars, poets and teachers. Bursaries will be available to deserving students. Further information about the TSE Summer School 2012.
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09 - 10 July 2012 |
Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies
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.
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10 July 2012 |
Book Collecting Research Seminar
Carl Williams: 'Collecting Counter-Culture'
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11 - 13 July 2012 |
Victorian Popular Fiction Association 4th Annual Conference
Keynote speakers: Regenia Gagnier: 'The global circulation of British literature and culture: British fiction, economics and the marketplace', and Deborah Wynne: 'Hades! The Ladies! Male Drapers and Female Shoppers' Guest Speakers: David Waller, author of The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow Victorian Strongman, and Helen Rappaport author of Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street – Cosmetician, Con-Artist, and Blackmailer The VPFA conference is now an established event on the annual conference timetable and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research. Our theme this year is Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture. This theme enables us to develop the interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century popular culture, and changing attitudes to money and economics across the period. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS
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13 July 2012 |
The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar
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06 - 08 September 2012 |
Dante in the Nineteenth Century
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.
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13 - 14 September 2012 |
Space and Place in Middlebrow: 1900-1950
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.
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15 September 2012 |
Weird Council: an International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville
Papers are invited for the first academic conference dedicated to the work of China Miéville. Despite the cricial acclaim of Miéville's fictions - as well as his prominence as a literary and cultural critic - there is little scholarly work on Miéville's already substantive oeuvre. The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Miéville's writing from any disciplinary position. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS
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21 - 22 September 2012 |
First International Djuna Barnes Conference
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.
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27 - 29 September 2012 |
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: Modernism and the First World War
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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09 October 2012 |
Book Collecting Research Seminar
Julian Browning: 'Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts'
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11 October 2012 |
Stephen Spender Research Seminar
'Bernard Spencer: Mystery Poet': Jonathan Barker, Professor Valentine Cunningham and Professor Peter Robinson discuss the writer's life, his work and his contemporaries. Chair Dr Lara Feigel (King's College London). Organised by Jonathan Barker for the Stephen Spender Trust and the Institute of English Studies.
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12 October 2012 |
Brave New World and its Legacies
When Brave New World first appeared in 1932 it caused a sensation. It was obvious that Aldous Huxley was intent on testing the boundaries of propriety (sailing especially close to the wind in terms of sexual and religious obscenity), but what kind of novel had he published? A satire, like his earlier novels; a horrified warning of things to come, or a vision of how things might be, for better or for worse, following a number of scientific, political and social adjustments to the Britain of his day? While the novel’s title has become embedded in the English language as a catchword for anything that is far-fetched, faddish, futuristic or forbidding, the possible meanings Brave New World have only proliferated over the past eighty years and its relevance to our own world has only increased with time. Certainly, the novel’s significance for our own concerns with eugenics, globalisation, dystopias, urbanisation, population issues, technological innovation, authoritarianism, anarchism, educational theory, mass society, liberty, control, Americanisation, constructions of culture, and the ongoing crisis of capitalism, could not be more obvious. Proposed papers that are keyed to any of these categories are encouraged, but we also look forward to receiving proposals that engage with any of Brave New World’s historical contexts, contemporary resonances and manifold legacies. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.
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13 October 2012 |
Dickens Day 2012 Dickens and Popular Culture
Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that allows Dickens’s work its particular “portability” (to use Juliet John’s term)? And what are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS
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26 - 27 October 2012 |
Cosmopolitan Animals
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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03 November 2012 |
South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
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
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08 - 09 November 2012 |
The Marginalised Mainstream: Literature, Culture & Popularity
Keynote Speakers include: Professor Phillip Tew (Brunel University), Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester), Christoph Lindner (University of Amsterdam) The Marginalised Mainstream seeks to discuss the growing interest in and importance of mainstream culture and the popular as ways of engaging with cultural products of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the long twentieth century, 1880–2010. Specifically, we seek to bring together postgraduate students, early career academics and established researchers working in the fields of Literature, Cultural Studies and elsewhere in the Humanities, to explore why mainstream culture and objects of mass appeal are so frequently marginalised by the academic community. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.
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13 November 2012 |
Book Collecting Research Seminar
Jolyon Hudson: 'Book Collecting: The Financial Nuts and Bolts'
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23 November 2012 |
The British Monarchy on Screen
Co-sponsored by the departments of the History of Art and Film, Birkbeck; Media Arts, Royal Holloway; the University of London Screen Studies Group; and the Institute of English Studies. With Madonna’s W.E on the Wallis Simpson-Edward VIII romance attempting to exploit the Oscar-winning success of The King’s Speech and The Queen, and a film drama on Diana’s romance with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan in production, this Diamond Jubilee year seems the appropriate time to consider the historic past and current effusion of film and television representations of the British monarchy. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.
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30 November - 01 December 2012 |
Wyndham Lewis: Networks, Dialogues and Communities
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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11 December 2012 |
Book Collecting Research Seminar
Roger Gaskell: 'Science, Illustration and the Royal Society'
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14 - 15 December 2012 |
Captivity and Culpability: The Disciplining Subject in the Literary and Cultural Imagination
Keynote Speakers: Bob Brecher (University of Brighton), Anthony Downey (Sotheby's Institute of Art) Societies often have ambiguous and even conflicting attitudes towards state institutions that fulfil normalising, reformatory, punitive or disciplinary functions. This conference aims to interrogate literary, filmic, popular cultural and artistic representations of the agents of those institutions, specifically in terms of guilt and culpability. The conference is organised by Alex Adams (Newcastle University) and Cornelia Wächter (University of Paderborn, Bielefeld University) in cooperation with the Institute of English Studies (University of London) and the Human Rights Consortium (University of London). CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.
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16 February 2013 |
Jane Austen Society 2012: Jane Austen's Men
Rescheduled from 2012.
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15 - 16 March 2013 |
Writers and their Libraries
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.
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