Raphael Samuel History Centre: Dr Yasmin Khan – Thursday 7 March QMUL

The Raphael Samuel History Centre 

invites postgraduates of any discipline to a workshop with historian, writer and broadcaster Dr Yasmin Khan

Thursday 7 March 2019, 3-5pm

Arts One 1.31, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End campus

The Partition of India: collective violence in a colonial context

Dr Yasmin Khan (University of Oxford)

This workshop will take as a starting point three short readings about the partition of India to think about the violence that accompanied decolonization in 1947. We will consider the causations of mass violence, how this is then depicted and written into historical narrative and the difficulties and challenges for historians who write about violence, particularly in the colonial context. Please read in advance of the workshop – the readings are short and easily accessible!

Places for this workshop are limited; please register with Katy Pettit: k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

Readings: 

Ian Talbot, Literature and the human drama of the 1947 partition South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 2007 (18: special issue), pp. 37-56 (pdf copy available on registration)

Swarna Aiyar, August Anarchy. ‘The Partition Massacres in Punjab’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 1995 (18.1), pp. 13-36. (pdf copy available on registration)

Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence. Nations, Fragments, Histories, (Stanford, 2005) [Introduction, pp. 1- 15] Full text of introduction available at https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=8717

Yasmin Khan is an Associate Professor of British History at the University of Oxford. She has published on the decolonization of South Asia including refugees, war and the Partition of 1947, most recently The Raj at War (Bodley Head, 2015) In 2018 she presented a short series, A Passage to Britain on BBC2.

This  workshop is followed by the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, delivered by Yasmin Khan. For details see www.rsmemoriallecture2019.eventbrite.co.uk

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Screening of A Fabrica de Nada (Pedro Pinho, 2017) @ Birkbeck Cinema on 6 March, 1PM-5PM, organised by CILAVS

One night, a group of workers realises that their administration has organised the stealing of machines from their factory. They soon understand that this is the first signal of a massive layoff. Most of them refuse to cooperate during the individual negotiations and they start to occupy their workplace. So when the administration vanishes to their great surprise, they’re left with a half-empty factory.

The closing of an elevator factory (one of many that close every month in the industrial outskirts of Lisbon) works in A Fabrica de Nada as a microcosm and a parable for dramatically exploring the textures and consequences of the feeling of impotence that most people felt during the years of austerity after the 2008 financial crash.

Under the shadow of bankruptcy, the characters in the film try to stay afloat and look for ways to reshape their lives. Driven by a sense of urgency and some kind of life instinct that remains, they are forced to embark, with reluctance and fear, in an unforeseen experience, a collective adventure. As the world around them collapses, new desires start to emerge…

Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/218929595

The film will be followed by a discussion and Question and Answer Session led by Patricia Sequeira Bras (Birkbeck) and Luis Trindade (Birkbeck)

Wed 6 March 2019

1:00PM – 5:00PM

Birkbeck Cinema

43 Gordon Square

London

WC1H 0PD

Entrance free but booking here required.

 

This event is a collaboration of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) with Birkbeck’s Centre for the Moving Image (BIMI)

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Deleuze and Guattari Reading Group: 5 March 4pm

Deleuze and Guattari Reading Group

Tuesday 5 March from 4pm to 5.30pm

We will discuss the two short pieces below:

Gilles Deleuze – “Desert Islands” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2004), 9-14.

AND

“Control and Becoming” in Negotiations (1995), 169-176.

The reading group is organised by BRAKC (Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community).

We will be in room 106 at 43 Gordon Square.

 

All welcome!

Dr Nathalie Wourm

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The Short Films of Helena Solberg – Fri 8 February 2019 12:00 – 17:00

CILAVS, Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, BIMI

cordially invite you to

The Short Films of Helena Solberg

Brazilian director Helena Solberg’s earlier films are contemporaneous with Brazilian Cinema Novo but her work remains uncharted to most audiences. Following her recent retrospective in São Paulo, the aim of this event is to bring into view Solberg’s earlier documentary films, such as The Interview (1966), The Emerging Woman (1974) and The Double Day (1975).

 

Documentary film genre conventionally uses oral testimonies of personal experiences but Solberg’s use of women’s testimonies suggests the deployment of a feminist practice of storytelling as a way to expose and oppose specific instruments of power. Shot 50 and 40 years ago, Solberg’s subject matters and aesthetic choices make her films current and prescient.

 

A discussion with Dr. Patricia Sequeira Bras (Birkbeck) and Prof. Catherine Grant (Birkbeck) will follow the screening.

 

Fri 8 February 2019

12:00 – 17:00

 

Birkbeck Cinema

43 Gordon Square

London

WC1H 0PD

Entrance free but booking here necessary.

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CFP: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives – Deadline 28 April 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Pathological Body From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives

A one-day symposium at the Institute of Modern Languages (IMLR), Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK

Friday 20 September 2019

Keynote Speaker: Dr Steven Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast)

* With support from the Cassal Endowment Fund *

What is sickness, and how is it represented in literature? In his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart novel cycle (1871–93), Émile Zola creates pathological bodies living within Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70), a period which is represented as being engulfed by political and social sickness. It is in the last volume, Le Docteur Pascal, that there is hope embodied within Pascal’s newborn son, the potential ‘messiah’ of the French nation. In the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Zola’s cycle may be a literary reaction to the state of a weakened France in exalting the mythicised image of the mother and child, at once a symbol of purity and new beginnings. Reflecting on the multi-dimensional aspect of Zola’s Naturalism, Henri Mitterand writes that these novels are not merely a form of social and historical documentation, but, instead, offer a knowledge that is more intuitive, modern and poetic, and which might be termed an ‘anthropomythic naturalism’ (preface, Émile Zola, Le Docteur Pascal, p. 48). This symposium aims to explore the nexus of fears, anxieties and desires that society projects onto the body within European literature and culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, tracing the birth and development of modern medicine. It will examine the widest meaning of sickness and the power dynamic between the body and society. Is sickness ever ‘just’ sickness, or is there often a covert ideological agenda that drives and constructs it? How can literature help us understand the relationship between the body and society? The symposium will take a transhistorical and transnational approach in order to see whether, and how, cultural anxieties which appropriate the body change and differ across European national boundaries during a time when medicine is establishing and asserting its increasing authority. The symposium will be an opportunity for colleagues to forge connections and to compare different approaches within the growing field of Medical Humanities within the Modern Languages.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

Fin de siècle

Gender

Race

Class

Degeneration

Blood

Hysteria

Social order

Myth

Sacred and the religious

Suffering

Contagion

Evil

Medicine

Illness and cure

Life and death

The other

Purification

Nationhood

Utopia

Politics

Deviancy

Contamination

Infection

Ideology

Rebirth

Healing

Morality

Necropolitics

Biopolitics

Power

Ritual

Abject body

Heredity

Identity

Proposals of c. 250 words for 20-minute papers in English and a 100-word biography should be emailed to the conference organiser, Dr Kit Yee Wong, by Sunday 28 April 2019. Notifications to potential speakers will be sent out by Saturday 25 May 2019.

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CFP: SLANT – Deadline 26 April 2019

Call for Papers

SLANT

Deadline: 26 April 2019

This is a call for theoretically informed, critically engaged poetic contributions for an anthology of feminist feeling, curated by Seam Editions and guest edited by Kim Lockwood. In this political climate, it is vital that we re-examine the metaphors, allusions, and avoidances that are used to construct or deny female experiences. We’re interested in work that not only reclaims or reworks traditional allegories of woman-as-muse or woman-as-myth, but pulls these metaphorical renderings apart at the seams, and refuses to let female embodiment, female feeling, and female actuality be made more palatable or less confrontational. Closing 26 April 2019 – read more www.seameditions.com/slant, or get in touch hello@seameditions.com

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Holograms in the Museum – Friday 1 March 2019

Holograms in the museum

Date: Friday 1 March 2019

Time: 6.30-8pm

Venue: Keynes Library, School of Arts Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

This event explores the increasing role of holographic technology in the arts and cultural sector.

Today the term “hologram” is often used to describe a wide variety of three-dimensional and virtual imagery, generated by technologies ranging from Pepper’s ghosts to augmented reality. Museums and galleries are increasingly using these technologies as a means to reanimate the past, create interactive visitor experiences and offer access to absent or fragile artefacts.

Beyond the initial excitement of these dazzling holographic spectacles, this event creates an opportunity to consider the aesthetic, ethical and technical questions raised by these practices. Why are holograms so popular as a means to reanimate history and culture? How do they alter existing practices of memory and memorialisation? What are our responsibilities when using holograms to reanimate people? How do holograms affect our temporal relationships with people, objects and artefacts? Why has holography become a metaphor for so many types of virtual experience?

This interdisciplinary discussion brings together animators, designers and media and cultural studies scholars to consider the changing significance of holograms in artistic and cultural practice.

The event will feature brief presentations by Chris Walker, and Nick Lambert, Jazz Rasool and Mike Smith, followed by a panel discussion chaired by Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Reader in Memory, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College.

If you have any additional access requirements please get in touch elizabeth.johnson@bbk.ac.uk

The discussion is free to attend but booking is encouraged.

Please book your ticket here. All welcome!

This event coincides with the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci and Perpetual Motion: Visualising Impossible Machines, which is taking place in the Peltz Gallery from 6 February to 12 March 2019.

Prior to the discussion, there will also be an opportunity to experience the Holo Lens animation of da Vinci’s designs in the Peltz Gallery from 5pm.

Speakers’ bios

Dr Nick Lambert is Director of Research at Ravensbourne University London. He studies art and technology, and the position of the digital medium in contemporary art and visual culture. Through this, he engages with questions about the boundary between “fine” and “applied” arts, design and interfaces. Lambert has written on the history of computer art and cutates exhibitions with artists and theorists in this field. He has also developed interests in the evolution of immersive visual technologies, especially full dome; and exhibited his immersive artworks in New York, London and elsewhere.

Jazz Rasool has a background in Science, Computing and Teaching. He is currently a Researcher at Ravensbourne University London (RUL) specialising in Technology Enhanced Education. His most recent work contributed to a €3m EU funded project creating Holographic (Hololens) workplace training for Air Ambulance crew in the Arctic as well as Astronaut trainers in Italy working with International Space Station and Mars missions. In 2018 he won a €30,000 first prize from Farfetch, the world’s 4th largest online fashion retailer, for Disruptive Innovation in Fashion, competing against 50 other companies globally, with his winning idea presenting technology for Holographic projection of fashion on people. Preparing for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Death in 2019 and collaborating with colleagues at RUL, Jazz was the first to create and see a holographic animated rendition of Da Vinci’s designs for Perpetual Motion machines, with the work on show at the Peltz Gallery, London and at the home of Da Vinci’s designs in the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.

Mike Smith is a creative content provider, animator, educator and visual storyteller, specializing in heritage, theatre and public installations. His expertise, as an animator and visual effects artist, allow him to provide these sectors with the standard of visualization and storytelling expected in the film and entertainment industries.

Chris Walker is the Managing Director of Bright White; a creative design consultancy based in York, England. Bright White formed in 2004. Their mission is to engage the next generation with the riches of the past and present, to help them live and learn. Bright White believe in learning by doing; giving the audience real agency to explore a subject, sparking their interest, creating memorable moments and, in the process, learning without labour.

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