Monthly Archives: November 2015

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History Open Day: Senate House Library 27th November 2015 – American Studies

It is the third edition of the History Open Day at Senate House on 27th November. This year we have an American Trail showcasing libraries, archives and organisations from around London with collections relevant to American studies. Librarians and archivists will be available to offer advice about resources, one-to-one clinics and training sessions.

More detailed information about the day and participating organisations is available at

http://historycollections.blogs.sas.ac.uk/next-history-day/

and on Tweeter at #histday15.

The event is free but we ask people to register using the Eventbrite link on the web page.

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ICA: Luis Buñuel Retrospective – 12th November to 6th December 2015

Luis Buñuel: Aesthetics of the Irrational 

ICA retrospective

12th November – 6th December 2015

‘the best director in the world’ – Alfred Hitchcock

Watch the season trailer

Luis Buñuel was a leader of avant-garde surrealism, an iconoclast and provocateur. He remains one of the most revolutionary filmmakers of all time.

We are excited to bring you a retrospective celebrating Buñuel’s work from the very beginning of his career with one of the most famous short films ever made, Un Chien Andalou (1929), through his extraordinary Mexican period including Los Olvidados (1950), Nazarin (1959) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), to his last works and such legendary films as Belle de Jour (1967), Tristana (1970) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

There will be rare screenings of Él and The Young One and the majority of the films will be presented from 35mm prints. There is also the rare chance to see short film Eating Sea Urchins, a surrealist home movie that Buñuel filmed at Salvador Dali’s house in 1930.

Highlights of the season include panel discussions and Q&As with speakers including eminent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, grandson Diego Buñuel, leading academics such as Maria Delgado, Jo Evans, Peter Evans, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla and Rob Stone, and film critics Tim Robey (The Telegraph) and Ryan Gilbey (The New Statesman and The Guardian).

 

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DORA PROJECT: 25 November 2015

DORA PROJECT (2015-2016)

A cross-generational archiving, participatory and community project that combines contemporary art, WW2 London and early rocket engineering.

DORA PROJECT is pleased to announce its second Commemorative Public Event on Wednesday 25 November 2015 at Goldsmiths, University of London, St James Hatcham, Room G01, starting at 12.30pm.

The event commemorates the 71st anniversary of the most devastating V2 rocket attack on London. On 25 November 1944 at 12.26pm a missile destroyed Woolworths and the Co-op on New Cross Road. 168 people were killed, 123 injured.

Based in London, DORA PROJECT is led by established artist Françoise Dupré in collaboration with Rebecca Snow, a young visual and participatory artist.

The project includes a new installation by Dupré, a postcard project, a series of commemorative public events in South East London and a school project at JFS, a Jewish Comprehensive School in North West London.

DORA PROJECT will conclude with an exhibition at Peckham Platform in April 2016.

DORA PROJECT connects two sites: London and Mittelbau-Dora Nazi Concentration Camp in Central Germany where V2s were assembled by slave labourers in an underground factory (August 1943-April 1945). Amongst them
was Françoise Dupré’ s uncle Robert Berthelot, a French political prisoner. More than 20,000 inmates died in Mittelbau-Dora while between September 1944 and March 1945, V2 attacks on London killed around 2500 Londoners.

After WW2, The German rocket engineers were employed for the development of space and military programmes in USA, France, Russia and Britain. Whilst many Londoners have heard about the V2, few know about its history that connects spaceflight to Nazi Concentration Camps. DORA PROJECT Commemorative Event at St James Hatcham, Goldsmiths includes a display around V2 attacks on London and the story of Dupré’s uncle in Dora concentration camp. On view as well, WW2
archive materials from The Museum Group based on New Cross Road and a short film by Rebecca Snow made in response to her visit to the concentration camp memorial site. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to DORA POSTCARD PROJECT by writing their testimonies and comments.

To coincide with DORA PROJECT, Deptford Forum Publishing has reprinted Rations & Rubble, Remembering Woolworths. Published in 1994 and edited by Jess Steele, the booklet is a remarkable act of remembrance containing tragic yet immensely brave human stories about the V2 attack on New Cross
Road.

DORA PROJECT is funded by Arts Council England and Birmingham School of Art-BCU, Centre for Fine Art Research. The project is supported in the UK by Goldsmiths University of London, Peckham Platform, JFS. In France by the Commission Dora Ellrich de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation; the Association Française Buchenwald Dora et Kommandos; La Coupole, Centre d’Histoire et de Mémoire du Nord – Pas-de-Calais, France.

For more information about DORA PROJECT visit: https://doraproject.wordpress.com

Or contact Françoise Dupré f.dupre@btinternet.com

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Our ‘Strange Disquietude’ – Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies: 12 November 2015

The next event of the autumn term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Richard Adelman (Sussex) presenting on ‘Our “Strange Disquietude”: Ruskin and Gothic Literature’ on Thursday 12 November 2015 from 7.30pm to 9.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

John Ruskin’s account of the gothic spirit, from the central chapter of The Stones of Venice, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (published in 1853), is highly influential and much fêted. Such influence has long been recognized over figures such as William Morris, over the architectural practices of Victorian Britain, and over political economic thought, especially after Ruskin’s 1862 publication of ‘Unto This Last’, which develops the earlier work’s critique of laissez-faire economics. But Ruskin’s innovative theorization of the concept of the gothic in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ has never been connected with gothic literature itself. This is a significant oversight, as this paper will demonstrate, one that has left a fundamental shift in Victorian gothic literature unrecognized, and that has allowed the eighteenth-century, consistently negative associations of the gothic to stand unchallenged in the very different world of post-Ruskinian gothic literature. Ruskin’s considerable influence over gothic fiction will be reconstructed, in this paper, by analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886).

The session is free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies.

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

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CFP: British Association for Romantic Studies: Romantic Voices – Deadline 20th December 2015

British Association for Romantic Studies

Call for Papers

Romantic Voices, 1760-1840

The Early Career and Postgraduate Conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies.

22nd – 23rd June 2016, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford, in association with TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Freya Johnston (University of Oxford)

Professor Simon Kövesi (Oxford Brookes University)

‘The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers’ (William Hazlitt)

‘Thus did I dream o’er joys & lie / Muttering dream songs of poesy’ (John Clare)

‘Coleridge came to the door. I startled him with my voice’ (Dorothy Wordsworth)

‘[Mary Wollstonecraft] is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living’ (Virginia Woolf)

Although the meditative insights of the “Great Romantic Lyric” have often been considered to be the voice of Romanticism, this conference will also explore and uncover different types of voices in Romantic literature, ranging from the loud chatter emanating from coteries and coffee-houses, to the marginalised voices of the disabled and dispossessed. It will understand ‘voice’ from a variety of perspectives: as the sound of communication; as the oral and written word; as a mode that anticipates an audience, even if only that of an internal listener; as the fashioning of the self, and the forming of communal identities; as a tool for disseminating knowledge and political opinions publicly and privately. We invite proposals for themed panels, as well as proposals for the traditional individual twenty-minute paper. Applicants might reflect on some of the following areas, though we also encourage you to interpret the theme more widely:

  • The self-constructed image of the poet as Bard
  • The lyric form
  • Dissenting voices
  • The rise of the periodical press
  • Voicing national and regional identities
  • Disjunctions between the oral, written, and published word
  • The politics of conversation and debate
  • Forums of exchange – from intimate and close-knit communities to literary salons and public institutions
  • Literary inheritance – the interplay between first- and second-generation Romantics, the impact of eighteenth-century voices on Romanticism, and the afterlife of Romantic thought
  • Non-linguistic modes of communication, and their relation to aesthetics, sensibility, morality, and politics
  • Reform debates and the relationship between literary and political representation
  • Narrative voice

As well as the plenaries and panels, we aim to include seminars led by early career scholars on some of the following: political dissent, poetics, letter-writing, the periodical press, scientific voices. We also anticipate that delegates will have a rare opportunity to see some Romantic manuscripts from the Bodleian Library.

Please send abstracts of up to 750 words for themed three-person panels, including details of all proposed speakers, and 250 words for individual papers to: romanticvoices@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is December 20th. We aim to notify successful speakers by the end of January 2016. More information will appear on the BARS blog (http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/) and website (http://www.bars.ac.uk/) in due course.

Organisers: Honor Rieley (Oxford), Matthew Ward (St Andrews), Jennifer Wood (Oxford).

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Matthews Lecture – 18 November 2015

This year’s Matthews Lecture will be at 5pm 18th November in Beveridge Hall in Senate House. It is being given by Professor Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow) and she is talking on ‘Chaucer and Wordsworth’s Vivid Daisies’. It is followed by a free wine reception. It will obviously interest medievalists and Wordsworthians, but also anyone who is interested in ecopoetics.

The event is free and everyone is welcome, but you need to book yourself a place here: https://matthewsnov15.eventbrite.co.uk

There is also a small accompanying exhibition of two books from the Senate House Library special collections which can be viewed in Beveridge Hall at the event.
http://www.materialtexts.bbk.ac.uk/?p=355

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MHRA Conference Grant Fund – Applications Invited

MHRA Conference Grant Fund

In 2016, the Modern Humanities Research Association intends to make up to ten grants of up to £1,500 each to support conferences or colloquia within the field of medieval and modern European languages and literatures (including English) held in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland and organised by academics based at UK or Irish institutions.

There will be two application rounds in the calendar year 2016, with up to five grants awarded in each round; the schedules are set out below. The awards will not be made to individuals to attend conferences, but to the organizers of conferences to provide assistance with organizational support and/or the travel and subsistence costs of certain participants, including postgraduate students.

Deadlines and Timescales

Round A

For conferences taking place between: 1st August 2016 and 31st January 2017. Application deadline: 31st January 2016. Decisions expected by: mid-March 2016.

Round B

For conferences taking place between: 1st February 2017 and 31st July 2017. Application deadline: 30th June 2016. Decisions expected by: mid-August 2016.

Applications can only be considered in the correct round, based on the planned date of the conference.

The application form and regulations are available via the website <http://www.mhra.org.uk/Funding/>.

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