Tag Archives: Birkbeck College

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Corkscrew Podcasting Lecture – 30 May 2019

Corkscrew Podcasting Lecture
Led by Dr. Dario Llinares (d.llinares@brighton.ac.uk)
Thursday 30 May 2019, 12-13.15pm
Location: GORB03

12:00 PUBLIC LECTURE by Dr. Dario Llinares: Podcasting Praxis: Questions of Research and Knowledge through Aural Mediation.

Bio: Dario Llinares is Principal Lecturer in Contemporary Screen Media at the University of Brighton, UK. His current research focuses on the status and practice of cinema-going in the digital age, and on podcasting as a practice-research method. He is co-editor of Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-founder and co-host of the very popular and esteemed Cinematologists podcast.

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New Approaches to Writing History – 9 May 2019

New Approaches to Writing History: A panel discussion with Bart Van Es, Sarah Knott, and Barbara Taylor,  jointly hosted by the IHR and the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

Thursday 9th May 2019, 6.30 – 8.00pm

Clore Lecture Theatre, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, London WC1E 7JL

Reception to follow

 

Booking essential; book here (www.history.ac.uk/events/event/19545)

 

Join Costa Book winner, Bart Van Es, and the feminist and historian, Sarah Knott, to discuss new approaches to writing history.

Once characterized by its authorial distance and dispassion, history is open to ever-greater experiment as a written form. The rise of first-person narration, the merging of history with memoir, the appeal of ‘non-fiction fiction’, and the historian’s place as agent of research, or even subject within the past, are all reshaping how academic history is being written, read and enjoyed.

In this event we’ll discuss the reasons for, and outcomes of, this greater fluidity of form. How do we explain a new readiness to experiment; what does a fusing of genres mean for historical values; can form shape method and understanding of the past; and where next for experimental history writing? Commenting on these topics are three highly successful practitioners of innovative history.

Bart Van Es is professor of English Literature at Oxford University. His latest book, The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found (Penguin), won the 2018 Costa Book award earlier this year. Part memoir of friendship, part family history, The Cut Out Girl opens into a detailed study of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the networks that supported the hiding of Jewish children. To the Evening Standard this is ‘a masterpiece of history and memoir’.

Sarah Knott is associate professor in history at Indiana University and the author of Mother. An Unconventional History, published by Penguin in March 2019. The study of mothering from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, Mother is an ‘unconventional history’ in its use of first-person as the means to undertake historical research, and in its piecing together of past mothering from anecdotal fragments born of interruptions.

They’re joined by Barbara Taylor (QMUL) who will lead the conversation with Bart and Sarah. Barbara is professor of humanities at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of The Last Asylum. A Memoir of Madness in our Times (Penguin, 2014).

 

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Incarceration: Space, Power and Personhood – 17 June 2019

Incarceration: Space, Power and Personhood

With Lisa Guenther

Speakers (tbc) Lisa Baraitser, Louise Hide, Leslie Topp, Tina Chanter, Shokoufeh Sakhi, Hilary Marland and Catherine Cox

 

Monday June 17, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Room 101, 30 Russell Square, Birkbeck College, University of London

 

Places are limited; to register contact Katy Pettit   k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

 

The aims of incarceration are manifold: to punish, to disempower, to deter, to silence, to interrogate, to reform. In this interdisciplinary symposium we will examine how the experience of incarceration – the myriad temporalities and spaces of imprisonment – shape personhood, psychic life and the possibility of interpersonal relations. The prison cell, as the typical site of modern incarceration, also provides a template for thinking about how carceral logic shapes lives and communities outside its walls, for example in psychiatric hospitals, schools, workplaces and gated communities. This expanded notion of carceral space describes the spatial organization of relationships among bodies and things through practices of criminalization, surveillance, confinement, segregation, and other forms of punitive control. In this workshop we will bring together short working papers which explore how different forms of carceral space shape and control the institutionalized subject.

 

We also take note of important recent work that considers questions of race, gender and class in the carceral setting, examine first-hand accounts, not least regarding the experience of ‘solitary’, and explore theories about particular psychological mechanisms, including ‘defenses’ in the psychoanalytic sense, that may be used by inmates in attempts to adapt to and tolerate long-term confinement. In exploring the various histories, logics, models and motivations behind such practices we also seek to consider how carceral regimes may reflect and sustain wider cultural processes, political systems and forms of social organisation.

 

The symposium will be held during the visit of philosopher Professor Lisa Guenther’s visit to Birkbeck in June 2019, arranged under the auspices of the Hidden Persuaders project, the Birkbeck Insitutute of Social Research and The Pathologies of Solitude project at Queen Mary. In her powerful book Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, Guenther provides a history and phenomenological account of solitary confinement, describing the lived experience of solitary as a form of perceptual and social death. As her account reminds us, exploring the dehumanizing effects of incarceration also provides an opportunity for reflecting upon conditions that maintain or destroy personhood; facilitate, reduce or destroy a capacity for human flourishing. This symposium will be an opportunity to examine how limitations on sensation, agency and social interaction profoundly influence the incarcerated subject’s perceptual and emotional experience of the world.

 

 

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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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Symposium – Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture – Friday 11th May 2018

Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture

One Day Symposium in Honour of Dr Letizia Panizza

 

Bloomsbury Room, G35, Senate House

Friday 11th May 2018

9.30am – 7pm

For more information please contact: Stefano.Jossa@rhul.ac.uk

Registration free at: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/15855

This one-day conference considers ideas of liberty, irreverence and womanhood in early modern literature and culture, with 17 speakers from British and European Universities.

Programme

 

9.30 Registration / Coffee
10.00 Giuliana Pieri (RHUL): Introduction
10.15 Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck College): Letizia Panizza’s Contribution to Scholarship
10.45 Coffee
11.15 The Contribution of Women to Early Modern Italian Culture
Chair: Sarah Hutton (University of York)

Abigail Brundin (University of Cambridge): Domestic Devotion in Renaissance Italy

Helena Sanson (University of Cambridge): The Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese and Panegirico (1628) by Isabella Sori ‘alessandrina’: A Lost Voice from Seventeenth-Century Italy

Francesca Medioli (Independent scholar): Arcangela Tarabotti and the 1620-1640 Gap Period

Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway, London): Gender, Privacy and Space in the Roman Baroque Palace
12.45 Lunch
 

13.45

 Poetics and Poetry
Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Alison Brown (Royal Holloway, London): The Poems of Piero de’ Medici

Amelia Papworth (Cambridge): ‘Do not blame me, but Ariosto’: Laura Terracina’s Discorsi and the Orlando Furioso

Ambra Anelotti (Royal Holloway, London): The Afterlives of Ariosto’s Characters

Poetry – Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
15.15 Tea
15.45 Philosophy – Chair: Martin McLaughlin (University of Oxford)

Unn Irene Aasdalen (Norwegian Humanistic Academy, Norway):  Diotima’s Role in Marsilio Ficino’s De amore

John Sellars (Royal Holloway, London): Philosophical Lives in the Renaissance

Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA): title to be confirmed
17.15 History, Art, Libertinism and Satire – Chair: Dilwyn Knox (University College London)

 

Marta Fattori (Sapienza Università di Roma): ‘1735 Machiavelli all’Indice: Processo contro il marchese Bernardo del Grillo e la sua biblioteca’

Angelo Romano (Università del Salento): Religious Reformed Satire of the Sixteenth Century

Chrysa Damianaki (Università del Salento): Reconsidering the Form and Character of Gian Cristoforo Romano’s Bust of Beatrice d’Este
18.45 Conclusion
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Work, Education and Workers’ Education panel, 25 April 2016

Date: Monday 25th April
Time: 7pm-9pm
Location: Keynes Library, Birkbeck College

Organised by PhD candidate Claudia Firth (Cultural & Critical Studies) in collaboration with PhD candidate Achim Lengerer (Fine Art, Goldsmiths)

An evening panel on the changing nature of work, education and workers’ education. The shift to Post Fordist modes of production and cultural and immaterial labour have changed our relationship to knowledge and how it is produced as well as changing the nature of work itself. With the increasing presence of work in education (for example through ‘employability’ training and work placements) it seems pertinent to ask questions regarding the relationship between work and education and the organisation of higher education itself. How have these relationships changed?  Are there models from the past that could be mobilised now? What might alternative models of organisation have to offer? Birkbeck College itself comes from a history of Mechanics Institutes in the UK originally formed in the 19th Century to provide adult education to working people so seems the perfect setting in which to ask some of these questions.

 

Speakers:

Stevphen Shukatis, lecturer at Essex University. His work includes writings on Autonomia, self-organisation, class (re)composition and cultural labour. http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/staff/profile.aspx?ID=2745

Mike Neary from the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, who currently provide free co-operative higher education. The SSC is run as a not-for-profit co-operative, and organised on the basis of democratic, non-hierarchical principles. www.socialsciencecentre.org.uk

Richard Clarke – until 2012, was Senior Lecturer in Conservation at Birkbeck College and Director of the University of London Centre for European Protected Area Research. Will speak about the history of Birkbeck and models of useful knowledge and ‘self-help’.

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New research seminar, ‘Fluid Physicalities’, 15 Jan 2016

Fluid Physicalities is a new research seminar convened at Birkbeck College by Anthony Bale and Esther Leslie, and funded by the Wellcome Trust. We will meet throughout 2016 and explore all manner of bodily fluids and their cultural, historical, and phenomenological aspects.

Our first meeting is next Friday, 15th January (6pm), when Isabel Davis will present a paper, ‘Waiting to wee: towards a history of pregnancy testing’, with responses from Lisa Baraitser and Sophie Jones. Liquid refreshments will, of course, be served.

Venue: Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1.

All are welcome. Further details of our activities for the year to come are at fluidphysicalities.wordpress.com

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