Monthly Archives: February 2016

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The Body and the Machine Screen Studies Group 10th Annual Postgraduate Training Day, Saturday 27 February 2016

Body and the Machine

Still from Mato Atom’s Seagulls, 2013

Venue: Woburn Hall, Ground Floor, Senate House
Date: Saturday 27 February 2016
Time: 9:30am – 4:30pm

This day is dedicated to the investigation of the relationship between our bodies, the various screens we encounter and the images they bring us. Our gestures large and small, our habits, our ready adaptation to the infiltration of gadgets call up a series of questions as to how to approach research of Screen Media.

Register: http://store.london.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=5&catid=121&prodid=1009

Programme

Registration: 9:30-10:00

10:00   Welcome, Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck)

10:30   Tea & coffee

11:00   Morning Panel: The Ephemeral Object of Study
Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary): ‘What am I looking at? Phenomenological approaches to the moving image in the age of digital media.’
Lucy Reynolds (Central St Martins): ‘Disciplining Ephemeral Practices’

1:00 – 2:15   Lunch break

2:15   Afternoon panel
Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths): ‘Just Fun Enough to go Completely Mad About: on games, procedures and amusement’
Richard MacDonald (Goldsmiths): ‘Projecting for the Spirits’

4:30   Reception

 

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Call for Papers: ‘Flaws’, ideas of error, disruption, and contamination from 1750 to the present, deadline 11 March 2016

 

Flaws

Cambridge English Graduate Conference, 18th April 2016

‘It is by seeking and blundering that we learn.’ – Goethe

We invite paper proposals for ‘Flaws’, a conference focusing on ideas of error, disruption, and contamination from 1750 to the present.

Successful abstracts will investigate conceptual, formal, and conscious flaws in works of literature and art. In probing these imperfections, ‘Flaws’ seeks to uncover unexpected connections, challenge orthodoxies, and broaden disciplines. From smudges in the archive to broken characters, from critical failures to digital glitches, we actively invite your interpretation of flaws and what they can teach us.

The external respondent will be Dr Adam Kelly, lecturer in American Literature at the University of York. He will be delivering a keynote lecture on ‘The Future of the Flaw’.

The conference will be held at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English on Monday, the 18th of April, 2016. Papers will be delivered in panels of three, with question periods to follow. The conference will also feature an exhibit from the University Library’s Rare Books Collection. Proposals should be abstracts not exceeding 250 words in length, and sent to flawsconference2016@gmail.com . The deadline for submission is 11:59 PM on the 11th of March, 2016.

 

Other possible topics include:

Disruption of racial, sexual, and gender identities Marginalia or uncorrected manuscripts Contaminated spaces and ecology Competing historiographies or revisionism(s) Translation Loss Psychoanalysis and trauma

Materiality: spillages and slippages

Glitch-art and emerging digital aesthetics

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Call for Papers: ‘Writing Between the Lines’, deadline 31 March 2016

Writing Between the Lines

A One Day Postgraduate Symposium Exploring Creative Writing as a Research Methodology.

Cardiff School of Education, Cyncoed Campus, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, UK

Saturday 3rd September 2016

Keynote Speaker: Professor Kevin Mills (University of South Wales)

Settling words together in new configurations lets us hear, see, and feel the world in new dimensions (Richardson, 1994).

With a fusion of theory and imagination, fresh visions may be realised and broader evaluations become possible.  If research is the methodical investigation of a subject or subjects in order to discover, uncover, develop and provide new knowledge then Postgraduate study in Creative Writing and Critical Practice becomes a powerful and worthy combined discipline within the academy.

This symposium seeks to bring together postgraduate candidates, teachers and practitioners to examine the relationship between theoretical study and creative practice with the aim of improving and upholding the sustainability of this expanding discipline at Masters and Doctoral level.  We invite papers which examine the lively dynamic between praxis and critical appraisal; explore the nature of creative writing as a research methodology; investigate its position within pedagogy and evaluate how it may be developed in order to elevate approaches to high quality research.

 

Call for papers

Proposals are invited, from PhD research students and independent scholars, for 20-minute papers. The symposium is open to contributors from all subject areas and disciplines, though it is anticipated that it will be of principal appeal to those interested in creative writing as a research methodology within the following fields: literary studies; visual arts; philosophy; creative writing; film production; education; performance; cultural geography; critical and cultural theory. Topics for papers will be organised into panels, which might include or resemble, but are definitely not restricted to, the following:

  • Cultural, global and political writing
  • Post-humanism
  • Psycho-geography and travel writing
  • Environmental and sustainability issues
  • Gender studies
  • National identity
  • Poetics
  • The relationship between Science and Literature
  • Digital Technology and Creative Writing
  • The Theory and Craft of Writing
  • Pedagogy and Research

Creative work, critical papers or a combination of the two are welcome.

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for a proposed 20-minute presentation and include a short biography. Proposals are to be submitted electronically here. The deadline for submission is 31st March 2016.

All delegates are invited to join a round table discussion of the research aspects within the creation of Dr David Oprava’s forthcoming experimental novel entitled: The Codex Epiphanix, directly following this symposium.

 

Queries and correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to Dr Lucy Windridge luwindridge@cardiffmet.ac.uk  or Selina Philpin sephilpin@cardiffmet.ac.uk.

Queries regarding organisation, accommodation and logistics should be addressed to Huw Jones and/or  Donna O’Flaherty, conference administrators at: cseenterprise@cardiffmet.ac.uk

For more information regarding this symposium please visit: Writing Between the Lines

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Birkbeck Forum for c19 Studies: next event Tuesday 23 February 2016

Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Spring 2016 Programme

When: Tuesday 23 February 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Where: Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

The next event of the spring term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Bethan Stevens (Sussex) presenting on ‘The Wood Engraver’s Self Portrait: the Dalziel Brothers 1839-1893’ on Tuesday 23 February 2016 from 7.30pm to 9.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

Abstract: The Dalziel Brothers were the dominant London wood engraving firm of the Victorian period. They had enormous cultural power at a key moment in history, and their output of around 54,000 prints published from 1839 to 1893 included everything from Dickens and Trollope illustrations to fitness manuals and Cadbury’s adverts. They produced many of the landmark images of the century, engraving all of John Tenniel’s designs for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of 1865 and 1871, as well as numerous Pre-Raphaelite illustrations to Edward Moxon’s landmark edition of Tennyson’s Poems(1857).

In this paper I investigate the role of the Victorian wood engraver and their business of artistically producing someone else’s lines. Is this mechanics, or creation? From drawing to autograph, the line is a powerful element of the way we understand artistic identity. The line is essential to aesthetics; without it there can be no boundary, no form, no artwork. Curling into letters and forms, the line connects writing and the image. An expressive gesture, the line is what links the body of the artist – their hands and eyes in particular – with the artwork as object. Mainstream Victorian wood engravers such as Dalziel had the job of creating another person’s line, and according to common beliefs about artistic identity and work, this is a paradox, which undermines many of our assumptions about what lines mean in art. My aim here is to explore Dalziel’s activity of making the other’s line, and to find a new method for understanding the wood engraver’s supposedly mechanical labour in relation to the imaginative and figurative artwork it produced. I think through the unique kind of authorship this involved, examining the wood engraver as line-maker, self-portraitist, signatory, stylist, and as (disembodied) hand and eye for hire.

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

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

For further information about the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, see: http://www.cncs.bbk.ac.uk/

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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, 2 March 2016

WeSawSpainDie

We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War

Wednesday 2 March 2016
Oxford University – Ciclo Madariaga

Speaker: Prof. Paul Preston
Introduced by: Diego Rubio (Junior Fellow, University of Oxford)

Time: 5:30pm
Place: Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU
Registration: http://goo.gl/forms/LaEZtlHCaa

From 1936 to 1939, the eyes of the world were fixed on the devastating Spanish conflict that drew both professional war correspondents and great writers alike. Despite difficult political, professional and personal circumstances Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Kim Philby, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, and many others wrote eloquently about the horrors they saw at first-hand.

Together, with many great and now largely forgotten journalists, they put their lives on the line. Facing censorship, they fought to expose the complacency with which the decision-makers of the West were appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Many campaigned for the lifting of non-intervention, revealing the extent to which the Spanish Republic had been betrayed. Based on extensive diary material and personal correspondence, Mainly British and American, but also Russian and French, Paul Preston’s account tells of the courage and skill of these men and women.

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Verdant Intersections: An Event on Landscape, Ecology, Poetry and Performance

Verdant Intersections

An Event on Landscape, Ecology, Poetry and Performance

Hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College, University of London.

When: 4 March, 7-9pm
Who: Linda Russo, Dan Eltringham and Laura Burns
Where: Birkbeck College, University of London – Room 102, 30 Russell Square

Linda Russo, Dan Eltringham and Laura Burns will be presenting a combination of critical and creative work for around twenty minutes each in response to one of the following themes: human/non-human ecologies, geopoetics, ecopoetics, landscape and/or site-specific work.

After the readings/presentations Richard Hamblyn and Stephen Willey will co-chair a short discussion between the participants.

 

About the speakers
Linda Russo is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman, 2015). Participant, winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize, and a collection of literary-geographical essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, winner of Subito Press lyric essay prize, are forthcoming. Her recent reports on Bioregional/Body-Regional poetics is “Emplaced, and local to.” She lives in the Cascadian region of the northwestern US, tends garden plots, and teaches at Washington State University.

 

Dan Eltringham is working towards an AHRC-supported PhD at Birkbeck College, entitled ‘William Wordsworth and J. H. Prynne: pastoral, enclosure and the commons’. In autumn 2015 he participated in the interdisciplinary network ‘Land, People, Poetry’ at Colorado State University as a visiting scholar. His poetry and translations have appeared in E-Ratio, Blackbox Manifold, The Goose, Intercapillary Space, Emotions in Dialogue, and Scabs are Rats Zine 4, and in two pamphlets, Mystics and Ithaca. His first full-length poetry collection is in process and he co-edits Girasol Press.

 

Laura Burns is a performer and writer working at the intersection of poetry, dance, live art and installation. Her work seeks to call into question the agency of the nonhuman world, reconsidering how language and consciousness stems from the biological unfoldings of the thinking worlds around us. Her practice explores how embodiment, orality and a practice of belief in unknowing, give rise to new perceptions, an ecology of knowledges and choreographies of being-with.

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Call for papers – ‘Writing Back: Subverting Dominant Narratives in American Culture’, deadline 14 March 2016

Call for papers – Writing Back: Subverting Dominant Narratives in American Culture

WHEN:  This conference will take place on 27 & 28 May 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS: Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words to kclwritingback@gmail.com by Monday 14th March

 

An interdisciplinary conference at King’s College London, organised by the American Studies Research Group and the Institute of North American Studies.

Discourses on the concept of collective cultural memory and histories are prevalent in modern society. They are a way of asserting group identity and also serve to exclude those who reject them. Counter memories can challenge this collective imagined history by giving voice to those previously excluded. Scholarship focusing on these collective counter memories and the way they subvert dominant cultural narratives should be considered in discussion of American culture.

As the home of American studies at King’s College London, we aim to promote interdisciplinary scholarship, from literature to political science, and we believe that collective counter memories provide a good place from which to survey the field. Narratives on collecting and documenting these memories raise questions about the reality of remembered history and challenge assumptions that may previously have been accepted within the academy. Therefore we welcome scholarship focused on non-canonical cultural productions/texts and radical processes/ideas.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute presentations on a range of topics relating to collective counter memories. Topics can include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • 9/11 and the war on terror
  • Truth/exposure of criminal activity
  • Race/(post)colonialism
  • Gender/sexuality/feminism
  • Deviancy/outlaws
  • Self-censorship/trigger warnings
  • Counter-cultures/sub-cultures
  • Protest/social media/activism
  • Solidarity/resistance
  • Comedy/satire
  • Precarity/vulnerability vs resilience
  • Cultural production/dissemination

We welcome submissions from postgraduates, graduates and early-career researchers from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to literature, history, cultural studies, film studies, international relations, sociology, and political science. Group submissions for panels are more than welcome, and please do not feel limited to a traditional panel format – we particularly welcome unconventional ideas and structures. We aim to be as inclusive as possible and registration costs will reflect that, but please let us know if you have any funding questions and we will try our best to help out.

Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words to kclwritingback@gmail.com by Monday 14th March.

 

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New seminar series 2016: Comparative Modernisms

New Seminar Series  2016 

COMPARATIVE  MODERNISMS

 

Monday 22 February 2016, 18:00-20:00, Senate House, Room 245

Catherine Bernard, Denis-Diderot University (Paris 7)

Modernist politics of translation: ‘Hanging suspended without attachment’

 

Tuesday 1  March 2016, 18:00-20:00, Senate House, Room 104

Rachel Bowlby, UCL-Princeton University

The Psychological Moment: the early modernist turn to psychology

 

The new Seminars Series in Comparative Modernisms stresses both modernism’s continuing relevance in the present and its complex, relational nature which calls for a comparative perspective.  It provides a forum for groundbreaking  multidisciplinary, transnational and inter-textual research in modernist studies by inviting international experts as well as hosting a variety of associated events, such as roundtables, workshops and colloquia.

The seminars are FREE and open to all. For further information and to book a place in advance please contact  Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou:  angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk

Future speakers  and events to be announced soon

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Screening: ‘London as a Village’ plus talk with filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro, 24 February 2016

The Center for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies invites you to the screening of

London as a Village 
+
Talk with film maker Takumã Kuikuro

Moderated by Prof. Paul Heritage (Queen Mary University of London)

Date and time: Wednesday 24 February 2016, 6pm-7pm

Location: Birkbeck Cinema, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

All are welcome, no booking is required   bbk.ac.uk/cilavs/events

In April 2015, film maker Takumã Kuikuro travelled all the way from his village, set within the Xingu Indigenous Territory (North Brazil), to the UK to take up a challenge from People’s Palace Projects: to spend a month in London producing and directing a film that would capture his vision of the city as a “village”. Takumã was selected from dozens of applicants through a grant scheme called Culture Connection Brazil, promoted by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture with the support of British Council and the Transform Programme. He was commissioned to record London from an indigenous perspective, exploring similarities and differences between his Kuikuro culture and the Londoners he christened “the Hyper-Whites”. The result is  a captivating and humorous anthropological documentary about western society and the many villages hidden under the skyscrapers of London.

Internationally recognised filmmaker Takumã is a member of the Kuikuro people, and grew up in the Ipatse village within the Alto Xingú Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state, central Brazil.  Aged 18, he was introduced to a group of anthropologists studying the villages, and became keen to learn Portuguese. It was through the anthropologists’ documentary team that he also discovered a passion: filmmaking. Through the project Video nas Aldeias – a film project that trains indigenous people to document their society and culture through images, founded by anthropologist Vicente Carelli, – Takumã started to shoot, direct and edit films about his village’s day to day activities, rituals and oral stories. His films started to spread quickly across Brazil and internationally, and soon he was presenting them in both  local and international Festivals. He was acclaimed for films such as The Day the Moon Menstruated, The Hyperwomen and Kariokas. Takumã became an Associate Artist of People’s Palace Projects in Autumn 2015.

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