Category Archives: Archived Events

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CPRC: Border Blurs – Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland. 5 December 6-9pm

The Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) invites you to the launch of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press). We are celebrating the launch of Greg Thomas’ fantastic book with an evening of papers and discussion on the practice of Concrete Poetry in both its British and international contexts.

Date: 5 December 2019

Location: Room B13, 43 Gordon Square, School of Arts, Birkbeck University

Time: 6-9pm

You can get a free ticket on Eventbrite here.  

More About the Launch 

6 pm – Welcome and Reception

6:15 – Introductions Steve Willey, Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing, Birkbeck and Director of the CPRC

6:20 – Greg Thomas, ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay, Albert Speer and the Ideology of the (Concrete) Aesthetic’

6:35 – ‘Exploring Border Blurs’ a Q&A with Bronac Ferran and Greg Thomas

6:50 – Bronac Ferran, ‘Letters to Mayer’

7:05 –  Nicola Simpson, ‘dsh and yantramantra: typestract as poemscore and prayer’

7:20 – Interval

7:35 – Matt Martin, ‘Ports in a Storm: Bill Griffiths’ Forming Four Dock Poems’

7:50 – Rebecca Kosic, ‘Transatlantic Connections: Concrete poetry in the American Hemisphere’

8:05 pm – General Q&A Chaired by Steve Willey

8:30-9 pm – End

About the participants 

Dr Greg Thomas Greg is an independent scholar and recent British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based in London.

Dr Rebecca Kosick is Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol and Co-Director of the Bristol Poetry Institute. She is the author of two books forthcoming in 2020: Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects, 1950-2010 (Edinburgh University Press) and a poetry collection, Labor Day (Golias Books).

Matt Martin is Stuart Hall Research Scholar at Birkbeck, researching the use of nation language and dialect in avant-garde poetry. His own poetry collections include full spectrum apotheosis (Contraband Books) and the dotted line (Gang Press). He maintains the event listings page Innovative Poetry Readings in London (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/readings).

Bronac Ferran is a PhD candidate in English and the Humanities at Birkbeck working on Hansjörg’s Mayer’s ‘typoems’ of the nineteen sixties. She is the author of ‘The Smell of Ink and Soil: The Story of Edition Hansjörg Mayer’ (2017) and the recently appointed Manager of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck.

Dr Nicola Simpson is a curator and researcher at Norwich University of the Arts. Her interests are in discussing, experiencing and performing the influence of Zen and Tantric Buddhisms on British counter-cultural art and writing. She is editor of The Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Occasional Papers, 2012) and co-editor of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Richard Saltoun, Riding House, 2017).

About Border Blurs

This book offers the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s to the 1970s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media, while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between the two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research, and will fill a vital gap in contemporary understandings of an important but much misunderstood genre: concrete poetry. It will also serve as a vital document for scholars and students of twentieth-century British literature, modern intermedia art and modernism, especially those interested in understanding modernism’s wide geographical spread and late twentieth-century legacies.

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LRS Seminar – Power and Objects in Portraiture 6 December 2019

Paris Early Modern Seminar & London Renaissance Seminar

Power and Objects in Portraiture

Keynes, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square (am) and National Portrait Gallery (pm)

6 December 2019 – 9.30am – 5.00pm

9.30-13.00 PART 1: Portraits: Manufacture, Meaning and Money

9.30-10.25 PANEL 1: Making the portrait: Images and things

9.30-9.50: Robert Maniura (Birkbeck), ‘What can (Renaissance) portraits do?’

9.50-10.10: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Expanding arenas of influence: Spheres, perspective, surfaces and the painter’s instruments’

10.10-10.20 Discussion

10.20-11.35: Panel 2: Men in Meetings

10.20-10.40: Matt Dimmock (Sussex),  ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: Robert Cecil’s Portrait in the NPG’

10.40-11.00: Karen Hearn (UCL, London) ‘Men in Black and a Turkey Carpet: Images of the 1604 Somerset House Conference’

11.00-11.20 Ladan Niayesh (Paris Diderot), ‘Evolutions of the oriental carpet motif in state portraits: Tudor to Stuart’

11.20-11.35 Discussion

11.35-12.00pm COFFEE

12.00-12.55 PANEL 3: Representation: Inside and outside the gallery

12.00-12.20 Anne-Valérie Dulac (Sorbonne Université), ‘The Lustre of Power in Nicholas Hilliard’s ‘Phoenix’ Portrait of Elizabeth’

12.20pm-12.40

Mathilde Alazraki (Paris Diderot), ‘Euro-Persian Self-Staging and Feminine Power in Teresa Sherley’s Portraits (1622-4)’

Respondents & discussion 12.35-12.55/13.00

13.00-14.30 – LUNCH and walk to NPG

14.30 Convene upper foyer National Portrait Gallery (to left of ticket desk)

(times include presentations of 10 minutes followed by discussion with the group)

WALK 1 14.30-15.35 Portraits and power: presentations and discussion

14.35 pm-14.50 ROOM 2

Eva Lauenstein (Birkbeck),  ‘‘“Death painted on their houses”: Female lineage and the portrait of Sir Henry Unton’

14.50-15.05 ROOM 2

Béatrice Fuga (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Henry Lee’s Fickle Harmony: Of Knots and Spheres’

15.05-15.20: ROOM 2

Nicholas Thibault, ‘John de Critz’s portrait of Sir Francis Walsingham between shadow and light’

15.20-15.30 pm SHORT BREAK

WALK 2: 15.30-16.30 The image abroad: courts, places and power

15.30-15.45 ROOM 4

Clare McManus (Roehampton), ‘Death by Fashion: John Fletcher’s Portrait and the Performance of Gender’ John Fletcher by an unknown artist from c. 1620 (hanging in room 4 – NPG 6829).

15.45-16.00 ROOM 4

Torben Lund (Birkbeck), ‘Anne of Denmark, Royal Consort’

Anne of Denmark (12 December 1574 – 2 March 1619), Queen of Scotland (1589- 1619) and Queen of England (1603-19)’ John de Critz the Elder, Oil on Panel, 1605-10.

16.00-16.15 Lauren Working (Oxford), ‘Anne of Denmark’s Imperial Gaze’

16.15-16.30

ROOM 5 Fanny Morasin  (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Anne Clifford’s Ornamented Hair and the Assertion of Filial Legitimacy’

16.30-: Discussion, Tea break in NPG café & free time (NB NPG is open late on Fridays).

 

The London Renaissance Seminar (LRS) is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of early modern history, literature, and culture. It meets regularly at Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. Anyone with a serious academic interest in the Renaissance is welcome and no registration is necessary.

For further information about this seminar contact Sue Wiseman: s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk and Eva Lauenstein: lauenstein.eva@gmail.com . To join the LRS mailing list, please contact Tom Healy: t.f.healy@sussex.ac.uk. Twitter: @LondRenaissance

 

 

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Re-/Un-working Tragedy: Perspectives from the Global South – 6-7 December 2019

Re-/Un-working Tragedy: Perspectives from the Global South

6-7 December 2019

SG1/2, CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT

Details of the programme are here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28574

Link to register is here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28574

Summary

Building on ideas explored in the Re- Interdisciplinary Network’s CRASSH events, the conference aims to examine ideas of repetition within canonical traditions of tragedy from the perspective of the Global South, in the process raising questions about the problems of those categories as they are changing. We want to scrutinize the literary, political, and philosophical relevance of re-/un-working tragedy in cross-cultural contexts. Taking up the concept of ‘tragedy’ in a world shaken by global conflicts, deterritorialization, and migration crises, the conference asks:

  • How do people in various zones of crisis embrace, interpret and adapt canonical traditions of tragedy to make sense of their suffering and express their resistance?
  • How do authors, playwrights, performers, philosophers, and critics respond to the questions raised by the reworking of tragedies?
  • How does the reworking of tragedies in the Global South transform the idea of the canon and/or decolonise the literary curricula?

We often employ the prefix ‘re-’, as in ‘re-working’, ‘re-writing’, ‘re-thinking’, ‘re-imagining’, ‘re-appropriating’, ‘re-presenting’ as if to situate the modern work in a historical line, or dialectical movement, of repetitions. The creation of the new cannot but come with reference to the prior. But how does recognisable repetition operate as a unique kind of site for invention, and for speech? Besides, how might we rethink the tragic canon as a destabilizing gesture – an un-working, rather than re-working – through perspectives from the Global South? In reference to ‘unworking’, or désoevrement as a concept that interrupts, suspends, and counteracts the work in the moment of its unfolding, the conference will look for ways to put the authoritative position of the ‘original work’ at stake. Unworking this notion of ‘the original’ reveals the work of tragedy as that which opens itself to reinvention and becomes self-consciously meaningful in the moment of its re-presentation.

The conference will bring together artists and authors who adapt classical tragedies together with academics from various disciplines. The programme will comprise roundtable discussions, panels and creative workshops.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28574

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History and Theory of Photography Research Centre – Autumn Term 2019

History and Theory of Photography Research Centre

All events are free and open to all. Feel free to circulate.

Wednesday, 20 November 2019, 6-7:30pm

Andrés Mario Zervigón (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)

Fully Visible and Transparent: Zeiss Anastigmat

Room 106, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

In 1890, the famous Jena Glass Works of Carl Zeiss released the Anastigmat photographic lens. The innovative device advanced a chapter in optical technology that seemed to have progressed automatically in a predetermined manner since the medium’s origins. The new lens offered a consistent field of focus across the photographic plate and corrected for a number of additional aberrations at lower and higher f-stops. But why exactly had Zeiss developed its expensive mechanism and what drove photographers to buy it? This paper suggests that the consistent focus and varied depth of field that the Anastigmat provided were not in and of themselves the desired goals of the improvements, but that they were instead visible signals of a pictorial model that makers and consumers had been seeking since the public introduction of photography in 1839. The goal was a transparent realism that remained stubbornly external to the medium, an illusionistic standard that had largely been mediated by painting since the renaissance and was now apparently possible in photography as well.

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His scholarship concentrates on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art, generally focusing on moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany (Reaktion Books, 2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). His current book project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung – The Worker’s Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany’s Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). At Rutgers Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice.

Monday 25 November 2019, 2-4pm

Launch of Special Issue of Memory Studies

Ottoman Transcultural Memories

Keynes Library, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Edited by Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck), Jay Prosser (University of Leeds), Colette Wilson (Birkbeck), Leslie Hakim-Dowek (University of Portsmouth). With contributions from: Gabriel Koureas, Jay Prosser, Colette Wilson, Jacob Olley, Nora Lessersohn, Claudia Roden, Aikaterini Gegisian, Leslie Hakim- Dowek, Alev Adil and Suna Alan.

We would be delighted if you could join us to celebrate the launch of the special issue of Memory Studies which resulted from the AHRC funded project ‘Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories’. Short presentation of the projection with Q&A will be followed by drinks reception.

Monday 9 December 2019, 6-7:30pm

Charlene Heath (Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada)

To Circulate and Disperse: Jo Spence, Terry Dennett and a Still Moving Archive

Room 106, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

There are over one-hundred high quality colour photocopies, home computer printouts, and digital files of British photographer Jo Spence’s work held in the collection at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada – the largest repository of her memorial archive. Spence (British, 1934–1992) was a radical London-based activist, socialist-feminist photographer, writer, educator and collaborator whose photographic practice challenged the art world and museum’s fetishizing photographs through conventions such as limited edition prints as collector’s items. Together with one of her primary collaborators, Terry Dennett (British, 1938–2018), Spence founded Photography Workshop in 1974, an alternative archive, research hub and resource centre that grew out of their dissatisfaction with current modernist trends in British photography and desire to contribute towards social change. Easily made and inexpensive, I argue that unlike many of Spence’s ‘vintage’ works now subject to the contemporary art market, the RIC’s photocopies, print-outs and digital surrogates, are a continued manifestation of Spence and Dennett’s political project of prioritizing dissemination and the rhetoric of their photographic messages over and above all else.

Charlene Heath is Archives Assistant at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada and a doctoral candidate in the joint program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson/York University in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and a MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University in collaboration with the Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, USA. She has written reviews and articles for BlackFlash Magazine, Photography & Culture, Aperture Blog, Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACER) (forthcoming), and Transbordeur photographie (forthcoming). Through an analysis of the now dispersed Jo Spence Memorial Archive, her forthcoming dissertation considers the enduring legacy of political photographic practice in Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Wednesday 11 December 2019, 6-7:30pm

Milene Trindade (University of Évora, Portugal)

Photographic Ex-votos: Images as a votive offering in the Alentejo region of Portugal

Room 106, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

In the 19th and 20th centuries, countless numbers of photographs were offered and displayed on the walls of churches, forming collections that represent local culture and devotion, as well as the history of photography. The research aims to develop our understanding of the cultural heritage value of these collections and the need for their preservation by proposing a guidance strategy for exhibition and safeguarding.

Milene Trindade (University of Évora) is a PhD student in History of Art writing her dissertation on photographic votive offerings placed in shrines in the south of Portugal. The project’s title is ‘Devotion, Art and Technique: Photographic Ex-votos in Alentejo Region from XIX to XX Century’, and it is being supported by the Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (FCT).

Friday 13 December 2019, 10-5pm

Photography, Space & Violence: a Workshop

The Cinema, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

This workshop is focused on photography as a tool for representing places where routine or traumatic violence unfolded. Primarily aimed at post-graduate students, it may be of interest to others. Four programmed talks will be mixed with shorter student presentations from research in progress.

10:00am-1:00pm:

Claire Zimmerman (University of Michigan)

Anticipating images: under construction in Buffalo, 1943-1906

Black and white construction photography of industrial architecture in Buffalo provides an untapped archive of historical information about one of the earliest centres of mechanised industry in the United States. Copious site photography provided a new supervisory tool for architects in the first few decades of the twentieth century, showing scientific management as it entered architectural production, and documenting the routine “violence” of Fordist labour in advance of its unfolding.

Claire Zimmerman is associate professor of architecture and history of art at the University of Michigan. She has published widely on architecture and curated several exhibitions. This term Claire is Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities visiting fellow.

Alberto Toscano (Goldsmith, University of London)

The Quantities of the Past: Photography in the Aftermath of Capital

Reflecting on three recent books of American landscape photography – Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochmical America; Mitch Epstein’s American Power; and David Maisal’s Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime – this presentation considers environmental devastation in the light of Frederic Jameson’s arguments about ‘dead labour’ in his 2011 book Representing Capital.

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory & Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths. Since 2004 he has been a member of the editorial board for the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. A translator of Negri, Badiou and others, Toscano has published widely on critical theory, politics and culture.

+ Student presentations

2:00pm-5:00pm:

Sean Willcock (Birkbeck, University of London)

Photography and the Spaces of Insurgency in British India

Photographs of atrocity sites were a staple of colonial photography in British India.  The aesthetic conventions of the genre shaped the physical and affective engagements of both coloniser and colonised with the spaces of violence. This talk considers how such photography addressed the fraught questions of guilt and retribution that were raised by atrocity sites and their associated politics of mourning.

Sean Willcock is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Art History at Birkbeck and writes on photography in Colonial India.

Steve Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London)

Poignant Spaces in Contemporary Photography

Many contemporary photographers have produced projects that depict the empty sites of former violence, notably the abandoned headquarters of the Stasi in Berlin. Beginning from the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet, this talk considers photographs as or at ‘the scene of a crime’.

Steve Edwards is Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck and Co-Director of the Research Centre for History and Theory of Photography. He has published widely on photography and other things and is an editor of Oxford Art Journal and for the Historical Materialism Book Series.

+ Student presentations.

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Arabic Poetry and Stories in Translation – Life Journeys 8 November 2019 6.30pm Keynes Library

Arabic Poetry and Stories in Translation

A Series of Workshops at Birkbeck and SOAS presented by Marina Warner (Birkbeck) and Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS)

8 November 2019

Haifa Zangana and Wen-chin Ouyang

Public event:

Life Journeys

6:30-7:30 pm

Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square

Tickets: https://bit.ly/36r2Aq8

 
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CFP: AB 2020: Beardsley Re-Viewed – deadline 30 December 2019

AB 2020: Beardsley Re-Viewed

28–29 May 2020, Bridewell Theatre, St Bride Foundation

Supported by the Alessandra Wilson Fund

Organised by Dr Sasha Dovzhyk

in association with the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies

‘The Beardsley “craze”, indeed – if “craze” there be – is really just beginning’. (H. C. Marillier, 1899)

A ‘decadent fakir’ and ‘an intellectual Marcellus’, ‘the Fra Angelico of Satanism’ and ‘the only artist who knows what the dance of seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance’: Aubrey Beardsley was many things to many an observer. He ‘pictured’ some of the iconic volumes of the Yellow Nineties, including works by Ernest Dowson, George Egerton, and Oscar Wilde, and defined the style of the two key periodicals of the English Decadence, The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Exploiting the cheap, accurate, and speedy method of photomechanical reproduction, Beardsley’s black-and-white designs achieved, in his own words, ‘publicity without a frame, and beauty without modelling’. Provoked by his wanton line, the guardians of good morals, parodists, and imitators added fuel to the fire of the Beardsley Craze, while artists worldwide absorbed the lessons of his stylistic economy and near-abstract composition. Although his professional career spanned a mere six years, the aftermath of the 1890s Beardsley boom was felt throughout the twentieth century across the globe. With the publication of Linda Gertner Zatlin’s fundamental Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné of 2016 to be followed by a major Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain in 2020, are we in a new ‘Beardsley period’ today?

AB 2020: Beardsley Re-Viewed aims to reclaim the artist for the twenty-first century and revive the subversive and transformative potential of the Beardsleyesque. This two-day conference welcomes interdisciplinary approaches as interventions to established models for Beardsley scholarship and invites debate about academic and museological narratives that have shaped Beardsley’s reputation. In keeping with the transnational turn in the humanities, we will explore responses to Beardsley’s work from a variety of cultural locales and across the arts. We are curious about the metamorphoses of Beardsley’s imagery and styles in the work of Mina Loy and Pablo Picasso, Claude Cahun and Leon Bakst, Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander McQueen, as well as lesser-known cultural figures and movements. While highlighting new archival work, we seek to reassess Beardsley in relation to the urgent debates around mediality, queerness, disabled identities, and camp aesthetics. Finally, we are eager to view and review the largest exhibition of Beardsley’s original drawings scheduled for Spring 2020 at Tate Britain and scrutinise the current ‘Beardsley period’ from within.

Forms of participation

  • Conference papers

We welcome 400-word abstracts for 20-minute individual papers which may reflect on the following themes:

  • AB as camp, AB in camp
  • AB and the economics of artistic freedom
  • Beardsley Women, Beardsley Men
  • AB’s sexuality and sexual iconography
  • Line process in relation to AB
  • Transnational Beardsleyism, global Beardsleyana
  • AB and the mythologies of the artist
  • Bibliophiles, collectors, Beardsleyites
  • AB within New Decadence and New Modernist Studies
  • AB and Medical Humanities
  • Queer perspectives and appropriations of AB

 

  • Contributions to the roundtable on Tate Britain’s Beardsley show

We accept 150-word expressions of interest from potential participants in the roundtable discussion of the upcoming exhibition at Tate Britain.

  • Creative responses

We are interested in featuring creative works that in any way engage with or draw on Beardsley and the Beardsleysque. The projects may include but are in no way limited to installations, readings, performances, photography, textile art, printmaking. Proposals should include a 500-word project descriptions, artist’s CV or Resume, up to 6 links or images of previous/related work.

Please email submissions and 50-word biographies to sasha@sashadovzhyk.com by 30 December 2019.

AB 2020: Beardsley Re-Viewed is generously supported by the Alessandra Wilson Fund.

Alessandra Wilson (1943–2007) was an outstanding teacher and a dedicated comprehensive head, who served 21 years, first at Walsingham School on Clapham Common and then Hampton Community College. Alessandra’s entire professional career was devoted to pursuing the ideal of equal opportunity. In keeping with this vision, we are delighted to offer free attendance to all as well as travel bursaries to students and early-career participants of the conference.

 

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Corkscrew Show and Tell (31 October) – For all Practice Based Research Students

Show and Tell: Birkbeck practice-research PhD students present and discuss their work in progress

Thursday 31 October 2019

2-5pm

43 Gordon Square Room 106

Mah Rana: Crafting with my mother: Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to investigate the lived experience of dyadic crafting from the perspective of adult-daughter carers of mothers with dementia.

Women hold a majority but marginalised status within dementia-care statistics. This marginalised, but also hidden status makes it important to explore ways of making women’s experiences visible and understood. My PhD research is a qualitative psychology study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to investigate verbal accounts in conjunction with primary source film footage of inter and intra-interactions of participant dyads (adult-daughter carers and mothers with dementia) in order to elicit a deep understanding of the meaning-making that daughters draw from their lived experience of caring for their mother.

Mah is a  2nd year PhD student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck. The multi-disciplinary focus of my PhD reflects the modus operandi of my established arts-based research practice. One Day When We Were Young is a short film, made in 2016 and subsequently a driver for the current PhD study, that explores the dementia-care relationship as mutually beneficial to both the carer and the person cared for.

Sasha Bergstrom-Katz: On the Subject of Tests

The project looks to examine and (re)present the affective dimensions of these tests by creating a visual archive of the test materials and by scripting, rehearsing and performing the tests in order to explore the experience of being the subject of study.

Sasha is an artist and researcher who utilises video, sculpture and staged performance to address issues of subjectivity, identification and diagnosis in the human sciences. Her practice-led PhD project centers around the history and aesthetic design of two prominent 20th century tests devised to assess the intelligence of children in pedagogical and psychological settings.

Open to all PhD students. No need to book.

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Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies – Autumn Term 2019

Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies

18 November 2019

Kirstie Blair (Strathclyde), ‘Excelsior! Inspirational Verse and the Victorian Industrial Worker’.

Our first Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies event of the new academic year takes place at 7.30 on Monday 18th November 2019, in room 106 of the School of Arts building, 43 Gordon Square. Professor Kirstie Blair (Strathclyde) will give a paper titled: ”Excelsior! Inspirational Verse and the Victorian Industrial Worker’.

This paper uses research from the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ project to discuss the enormous popularity of inspirational, motivating verse, a genre usually critically disregarded. It examines the role such poetry played in the cultures of working-class self-improvement and mutual improvement, for both working-class writers and readers.

Prof Kirstie Blair is the author of numerous articles/chapters and three books on Victorian poetry and its wider impacts on Victorian culture: her latest study, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press and Community, has just been published by OUP. She is the PI on a 2-year AHRC project, ‘Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace’, on which she works closely with a number of industrial heritage museums and creative partners. She is currently running a series of MOOCs on ‘Working Lives’, exploring the history of Victorian workers on the railways, in coal-mining, and in textile factories and mills.

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

Forthcoming Events

Alison Booth (Virginia): ‘Illustrating the Life and Complete Works of George Eliot: Homes and Story-Worlds.’

Wednesday 5th February 2020, 6.00pm. The Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square

 

Deborah Lutz (Louisville): ‘Marginalia and Other Forms of Graffiti.’

Wednesday 11th March, 2020, 6.00pm. The Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square.

For more information on the Centre and its activities, see www.cncs.bbk.ac.uk

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Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre – Autumn 2019

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre – Autumn 2019

Scream Queer Murder!

On Thursday 7 November, 6-7.30pm, join us for a panel and discussion considering the “gay” characters in Agatha Christie’s work and the R & D of Scream Queer Murder! by Martin Lewton, recently premiered at the International Agatha Christie Festival 2019. The evening includes readings from the play, topped off by a generous dollop of Polari – the secret language gay men used to protect themselves.

This event is free of charge to attend – book here.

Contributors:

  • Andrew McKinnon Theatre Director, and Director of Studies, Institute of the Arts Barcelona
  • Martin Lewton Fellow of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Artistic Director of Theatre Northand ¡Barcelona Solo! Festival, and author of Scream Queer Murder!
  • Julius Green Fellow of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Olivier award-winning theatre producer, and author of Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre and How To Produce a West End Show
  • Dr JC Bernthal Panel Tutor, University of Cambridge and Visiting Lecturer, Middlesex University, whose books include Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Graduate Research in Theatre

GRiT is our termly research seminar, featuring presentations by visiting scholars, faculty and graduate students. There is no need to book in advance to attend.

Wednesday 11 December, 4-5pm (Room 106), Lewis Church (Birkbeck, and independent scholar, writer and producer), ‘Unruly Access’
This presentation will discuss how research on the experimental and sometimes seemingly inaccessible topics of experimental theatre practices of the twentieth century, contemporary live art, and subcultures can sit alongside a parallel professional practice as an arts writer and editor concerned chiefly with notions of access. Both have been enriched by the other, and the attempt to address structural issues in the creative sector, (particularly in relation to gender, race, class and disability) can perhaps benefit from a commitment and attention to the uncomfortable, unconventional and occasionally unruly.

Forthcoming sessions:

  • Wednesday 11 March, 4-5pm (Keynes Library): Ian Morgan (RADA)
  • Wednesday 6 May, 4-5pm (Keynes Library): Sarah Grochala (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Birkbeck Theatre Alumni

Birkbeck Theatre Alumni network was set up in 2019 to explore ways for graduates of Birkbeck theatre programmes to stay in touch and share skills, resources and opportunities.

Our first meeting will take place on Friday 29 November at 6-8 pm in G10, 43 Gordon Square. For more information, and to book, click here.

London Theatre Seminar

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre also supports London Theatre Seminar. For the schedule of seminars for 2019-20, click here

For regular Centre news click here or follow us on Twitter @BirkbeckCCT

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