‘Things, In Theory’:

In the last two weeks of term we’ll think about strange indisciplined research objects in two sessions run from different periods and angle. Each session is run in reading group style using the reading as an opportunity to think about how to handle objects that perplex our disciplinary frames:

Wednesday 9, 8pm, Room 112 (this will be a one hour session from 8-9pm)

Lisa Mullen (Birkbeck-Wellcome ISSF Research Fellow)

Ian Hodder, ‘The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-term View’, New Literary History, 45:1 (2014), 19-36, available online at http://newliteraryhistory.org/articles/45-1-hodder.pdf

Wednesday 16 March, 6.00-8.00, Room 112

Tabitha McIntosh (PhD candidate, English and Humanities)

Readings:

Bill Brown, ‘Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny’, Critical Inquiry, 32:2 (2006), 175-207, available through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/stable/pdf/10.1086/500700.pdf?acceptTC=true

Session Leaders:

Lisa Mullen has recently completed a PhD on ‘Midcentury Gothic: The agency and intimacy of uncanny objects in post-World War II British literature and culture’ and is currently an ISSF fellow working on medical objects. She will also bring in some case histories to explain how she’s using the metaphor of entanglement in her work on medical objects and the entanglements of interdisciplinarity.

Tabitha McIntosh is writing a PhD on ‘White Rascals, Black Mischief: Anecdotes in the Atlantic World, 1788-1865’. She will be talking about ways of theorising uncanny Haitian objects in early c20 America – imaginary silver bullets that emerged in purported non-fictional accounts of post-revolutionary Haiti and real buttons of the 1811-1820 Kingdom of Hayti that began rising from the earth across the Pacific Northwest.’

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: Bill Brown, Ian Hodder, ISSF, LIsa Mullen, Tabitha McIntosh, Things in Theory, Wellcome