Author: ubcg56b

Graduate Research School Manager

Call for papers: Early Modern Matters – Materiality and the Archive

Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive

University of East Anglia, 11-12 May 2019

Keynote Speakers:
  • David Rundle (University of Kent)
  • Rachel Stenner (University of Sussex)

In an age when researchers can access materials from around the globe from the comfort of their own homes and offices, why should we still travel to archives? How can we shed light both on the ‘text’ itself – written, drawn, or otherwise – and on the culture in which it was embedded by studying archival, material texts not only as vessels for words, but as objects created and put to use in everyday life? The ‘Early Modern Matters’ conference will bring together scholars of all disciplines whose research engages with the material textual culture of the early modern period (c. 1500-1700).

Call for papers

Proposals are invited from doctoral students whose universities are affiliated with CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South-East England) for 20-minute papers, which have firm foundations in the study of material texts or, whether literary, artistic, historical, scientific, etc.

Deadline

If you are interested in contributing to the conference, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words together with a short biography to: a.wyatt@uea.ac.uk by February 25 2019.

More information about this event and about how to register is available here.

BGRS Winter Party

BGRS Winter Party

Tuesday 11 December, 18.30 – 20.30

We invite all Birkbeck postgraduate researchers to attend the BGRS Winter Party. Come and celebrate achievements of the Autumn term and meet with other research students from around the college.

Drinks (non-alcoholic as well as alcoholic) and nibbles will be provided but please sign up so that we can order the right amount of catering.

Sharing Feminist Research and Practice

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognise our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separation that have been imposed on us and which so often we accept as our own.”
Audre Lorde

 Sharing Feminist Research, Methods and Practice Event 

The CHASE Feminist Network was borne of discussions wishing to provide spaces of resistance in what continues to be a patriarchal higher education sector, with ongoing and intersectional discrimination happening at all levels. We seek to create a community of inspirational people inside and outside of CHASE who are challenging this environment, provide spaces for discussion, and offer support for innovative projects and events. The network is transpositive and intersectional, and places a strong emphasis on the importance of interdisciplinary commitments to feminist research and practice and welcomes a wide variety of creative, artistic, historical, literary, theoretical, and experimental contributions.

We would like to invite proposals for contributions to our two-day event from staff and students at CHASE funded institutions. We hope to receive proposals for a variety of formats, including individual or collaborative papers (20 minutes), workshop suggestions, themed topic roundtables, creative workshops, and performances, which aim to demonstrate the plurality and the breadth of feminist expression across CHASE.

This event wishes to address how discrimination within the academy, the unequal distribution of emotional labour, and imbedded cultures of privilege, can be troubled, disrupted and overturned through feminist approaches in academia. Taking feminist methodologies and pedagogies as its central focus, the event aims to address the complexities and nuances of working in a feminist way whether feminism is a focus of the research or not.

We welcome submissions that consider queer and feminist ways doing of research, cultural analysis, teaching, and artistic practice. How can this operate through activism? How can a feminist approach become an act of resistance in itself in spaces of intersectional oppression? How can feminism be an everyday practice of resistance to hierarchies in the academy and beyond, as a way of creating and recreating our own academic identities in a hostile system? We are particularly interested in submissions that address, but are not limited to:

  • Trans rights and visibility
  • Race, legacies of empire and decolonising the curriculum
  • Motherhood, childcare and caring responsibilities
  • Feminism and (dis)ability
  • Precarious employment and the pay gap
  • Gender and austerity
  • Gender and age(ism)

The event will include a workshop on identifying the relevance of feminism in your research.

Please complete the form below with an abstract no more than 300 outlining your submission idea with a short bio by 30th November.  We are also pleased to announce that we have a childcare fund available for this event.

Please submit your abstract and bio here: https://goo.gl/forms/txtVituZQ0fOUISL2

For any queries, please do not hesitate to contact chase.feminist@gmail.com

Dandelion Journal – Call for Editors for 2018-19

Dandelion (dandelionjournal.org) is the Postgraduate Arts Journal in the School of Arts, run by research students. The Journal encourages a multi-disciplinary research approach to the Arts, and provides a supportive environment to the publishing experience, offering a space to develop and showcase thoughts and ideas whilst shaping, and writing on, your research.

Current Birkbeck School of Arts Postgraduate Students are encouraged to join the Dandelion Journal Editorial Team for the academic year 2018/19. No publishing or editorial experience is necessary: you will learn editorial skills as you go. Although, if any, these will be a valuable asset.
Your research area should lie within, or across, the fields of: History of Art, Museum Cultures, Film, Media and Cultural Studies, English and Humanities, and Cultures and Languages. You can be at any stage in your research.

We are looking for:
1. General Editors (suitable for PhD students)
2. Subject Editors (suitable for MA or PhD students)

About the roles:
1. General Editors will start the production of the new Volume in December 2018 and will be responsible for the editorial supervision of the next Dandelion volume. They will be selecting the new theme and writing the Call for Papers, setting the timetable for the issue, selecting Subject Editors, commissioning articles, and sharing production management tasks.

2. Subject Editors will be required to edit and copyedit two or three articles (between 1500 – 8000 words) – the timing of this will be confirmed by the appointed General Editors (it may range, for example, between April and August 2019). You will be asked to attend two or three editorial meetings with the rest of the team during this time. You will also be welcome to contribute to events planning, design, typesetting etc. Subject Editors are assigned to articles, and therefore advise contributors, according to their subject area expertise.

If you are interested then we would love to hear from you. Please send an email expressing your interest in either editorial role, and detailing any relevant experience you may have, by Saturday 1st December to mail@dandelionjournal.org. In your email please include details of which
research programme you are enrolled in, and the research area you are focusing on. If you have any questions then please do get in touch – we will be happy to answer them.

We look forward to hearing from you.
The editors
Donatella Valente and Jenny Turner

CHASE Training Opportunities

CHASE brings together 9 leading institutions engaged in collaborative research activities including an AHRC doctoral training partnership, supporting discipline-based projects, specialising in interdisciplinary research, and research in emerging fields of study and creative practice.

It is central to the ethos at CHASE that serious disciplinary research is interdisciplinary. The following training opportunities are available to research students:

The Future of Arts Research

This programme of innovative skills training is geared toward those involved in practice research, generally, and arts research, specifically. The nature of the training is inherently interdisciplinary, devised and developed by researchers across Fine Art, Performance and Poetry. The training will be suitable and beneficial to researchers at any stage of their project’s development and, while specifically relevant to artist researchers, will be open to researchers in any field.

There are four skills workshops, each dedicated to a key element of practice research. The workshops are scheduled on the following two days:

Workshops 1 & 2:        Wednesday, 14 November 2018 @ 11.00 – 18.00

Workshops 3 & 4:        Wednesday, 27 February 2019 @ 11.00 – 18.00

All of the workshops will be held at Goldsmiths College.

Participants may sign up for individual workshops, or may choose to attend the entire series.

Details of the workshops and how to sign up are here

Peer Coaching taster session (collaborative with WRoCAH DTP)

25 January 2019 | 11:00 – 16:00
London Venue TBC

Would you benefit from being part of a supportive peer group of WRoCAH doctoral researchers for a whole academic year and beyond?
Peer coaching groups that meet regularly are known as ‘action learning sets’. Groups are intended to offer mutual support and coaching. For each meeting group members are invited bring their current challenges and the group works with them to coach them towards potential solutions.

Taking part in this workshop will give you the chance to work with a group of peers to develop your coaching skills to improve collaborative working, communication and professional relationships. The skills of coaching can be applied to help you get the best out of yourself and the best out of others. This can be in your research, in your teaching or in working with or supervising of others.

 

Find out more and register here

 

MARs Session: Radiological Deep Time (by Mountain of Art Research – Goldsmiths)

Various dates, please see below
MARs Research Hub, Seminar Space (Room 5), 43 Lewisham Way London SE14 6NP

This MARs Session will investigate theoretical ideas and artistic practices concerned with radiological deep time. From nuclear landscapes of mining, test sites, and waste storage sites. The session will focus on the problems of decolonising the nuclear, through feminist and forensic analysis, rethinking nuclear landscapes at home, and the mythologies of distant test and mining sites.

Research Student Prep Session Two – 2 Nov, 3-5pm
Research Student Prep Session Three – 23 Nov, 3-5pm
MAIN SESSION / Nuclear Culture Research Symposium: 30 Nov, 10.30am – 6pm & 1 Dec, 10.30am – 2.30pm

 

Find out more and register here

 

Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive & Call for papers

11-12 May 2019
University of East Anglia

From the creation of almanacs, gazettes, and paperbooks – whose ephemeral life span led to their repurposing in manifold ways – to the circulation of sermon collections, commonplace books, and annotated printed volumes, the materiality of the early modern world is unavoidable. By studying archival material texts, not only as vessels for words, but as objects created and put to use in everyday life, we can shed light both on the ‘text’ itself – written, drawn, or otherwise – and on the culture in which it was embedded.

The ‘Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive’ conference will bring together scholars of all whose research intersects with the material textual culture of the early modern period (c. 1500-1700). These disciplines include, but are not limited to: the history of the book, art history, literature, the history of medicine, the history of science, and the history of law. By drawing together these strands of early modern scholarship we hope to expand our understanding of how early modern people interacted with texts as physical objects.

Read full call for papers and register here

 

City Maps – few places left on the Tuesday 21 November session

Birkbeck, Bloomsbury campus

Researching screen media and global cities.

In this workshop, Johan Anderson from King’s College London will lead a workshop with Lawrence Webb (University of Sussex), building on themes introduced in their co-edited books Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media (2016) and The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture (forthcoming, 2019). This will comprise a film screening and a workshop at the Birkbeck Cinema. In the workshop session, Andersson and Webb will lead a discussion on the challenges of researching cinema/screen media and cities at a time when both have become destabilized as objects of study. Students will be encouraged to draw on their own PhD projects to consider a range of research methodologies and theoretical approaches to screen media and cities. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb will present on their own recent research projects and talk about the challenges of interdisciplinary research and publication. Topics will vary depending on the doctoral students participating, but are likely to include: film, media and the digital turn; gentrification; landscape theory; genre; queer studies; urban history; archival research; location shooting; and urban institutions. Doctoral students working on any urban/national context or historical period are welcome to attend.

Register for this or other City Map sessions

CHASE Training Opportunity | Doctoral and Early Career Researchers

How to collaborate: an introduction to working with external partners

Monday 19 November, 11.15am-3.30pm Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS

Led by Dr Keith M. Johnston, UEA Arts & Humanities Associate Dean for Innovation & Paul Roberts, University of Sussex Head of Business Engagement

Do you want to develop your research beyond the university, but not sure where to start? Do you think your research could help an existing company or sector? Working with organisations – be they commercial, arts funded, third sector, governmental – can be an incredibly rewarding experience, helping you translate your research and/or research skills to a different environment, with different demands and expectations. Working with non-HEIs is also becoming more important across the UK research landscape, with the KEF (Knowledge Exchange Framework) being mooted to start in spring 2019.

This session will offer expert advice and practical tips on identifying, approaching and working with organisations, and on the opportunities available for collaborative work. Topics to be covered will include:

• Why work with partners – what do they add?
•  What do partners want?
•  How do you get started – who makes the first move?
•  What timescales and demands are suitable for these projects?
•  What ethical / legal implications might there be?
•  What happens if it all goes wrong?
•  Will this help me get a job?

This session, part of the CHASE Encounters conference, is open to doctoral and early career researchers from CHASE member institutions.

Register here

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Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region Second Biannual Postgraduate Conference

The School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at SOAS University of London invites proposals for paper presentations at a forthcoming postgraduate conference, to be held at SOAS on the 1st and 2nd of May, 2019.

The conference is designed as a forum that brings together UK-based PhD students working on the MENA region from any perspective. MENA here is defined in the broadest possible terms and includes the countries of the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Iran and the central Asian states. The School particularly welcomes proposals that
• adopt interdisciplinary approaches
• reflect critically on the process of conducting interdisciplinary research
• engage with a combination of textual, visual, aural and digital sources

However, the School welcomes any proposal that is pertinent to the study of MENA. Presentations will be recorded on video and uploaded to the web.
The conference will be the second on this theme organised and funded through the Consortium of the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), the first having been hosted by the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS) of the University of Sussex in April 2017. Faculty members from across the CHASE group of universities will participate in the conference as panel chairs and commentators. This will ensure doctoral students receive critical feedback on their work from leading scholars who work on the MENA region from a variety of viewpoints.

Abstracts of 300 words with CHASE CONFERENCE in the subject bar should be sent to Marlé Hammond (mh93@soas.ac.uk) no later than 31 December 2018. Students from CHASE institutions (The Courtauld Institute of Art, Goldsmiths, Open University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Kent, University of Sussex, Birkbeck, and SOAS) may apply for reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses through their institutions. See https://www.chase.ac.uk/hb-funding#apply

The conference organisers will be able to offer successful candidates from other UK institutions some funding for these costs. There is no registration fee.

B R E A T H I N G

The Arts Research Dandelion Journal is pleased to announce the release of the New Autumn Issue, b r e a t h i n g.

“Through the critical reflections brought together in this issue, and beyond them — in the films, art installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, histories, writings, videos and photographs on which they draw — Dandelion seeks to invoke a meditative journey, and a dynamic and affective encounter with  b r e a t h i n g.” (1)

With contributions from:
  • Breathing Through the Medium: Representations of Refugees in Contemporary Art, Greta Adorni
  • From Exhalation to Transformation: The Female Body in the Orientalist Romance, Pauline Suwanban
  • Mobile, Malleable, and Modified: Tapestry in Early Modern Literature, Masuda Qureshi
  • B r e a t h i n g in Apichatpong, Donatella Valente

  • Hyperventilations, Dylan Williams
  • We Can’t Breathe, Anna Jamieson and Kasia Ozga
  • Breathe: Making the Invisible Visible, Carly Robinson and Elizabeth Pimentel de Çetin
  • Breathless Rictus: Ken Currie’s Krankenhaus, Christine Slobogin
About Dandelion:

The Arts Research Dandelion Journal is based in the School of Arts at Birkbeck. The journal is for and by postgraduate research students and early-career academics, and gathers contributions not only from Birkbeck, but also from other academic institutions. It encourages a multi-disciplinary research approach to the Arts, and provides a supportive environment to the publishing experience, combined with precise editing advice by Subject Editors expert in the contributor’s area of research. Dandelion aims to offer a space to develop and showcase your many serendipitous thoughts and ideas you encounter whilst shaping, and writing on, your research. Dandelion disseminates Call for Papers generally once a year, although you are welcome to generate a specific topic and / or even guest-edit a small supplementary edition. For any contribution ideas, or if you’re interested in joining the editorial team, as a General Editor, Subject Editor, or Copyeditor you can email the Editors (Donatella Valente and Jenny Turner) on mail@dandelionjournal.org . You can follow us on Twitter @dandelionbbk

 

(1) Valente, D & Turner, J . (2018) “Editorial”, Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal and Research Network. 9(1)

New CHASE Training opportunities

The following CHASE training opportunities are available to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether you are funded by CHASE or not.

CHASE conference presentations workshop – limited places available

Monday 5 – Tuesday 6 November, Birkbeck, University of London | 1000-1700

A two-part workshop on writing and giving conference papers which combines an introduction to academic conferences, writing abstracts and preparing presentations, with a practical session on the second day (run as a mock-conference) in which the participants have the opportunity to rehearse the delivery of sample presentations, handle questions and receive feedback. Josie has given this workshop in over 30 universities in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Introduction to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Wednesday 7 November 2018 | Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

Since its founding in 1946, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) has presented ground-breaking projects across the arts, situating contemporary culture within the socio-political conditions of the times. As a professional partner of CHASE, the ICA is delighted to offer training and placements to CHASE-funded and affiliated students. This event provides a valuable introduction to the ICA, with a particular focus upon the Institute’s film programme and documentary film festival, Frames of Representation (FoR.) This will be led by Nico Marzano, film programmer and curator at the ICA, who will also be available to answer questions about upcoming placement opportunities working on FoR 2019.

Students will have the opportunity to visit Version History, the first solo exhibition in a major UK institution by artists, filmmakers and designers Metahaven, featuring an expansive new moving-image commission as part of an overview of their hybrid investigations into overlapping geopolitical, technological and emotional conditions. More details about the exhibition can be found here.

CA is generously offering 20 tickets to attend a film screening in the evening. The tickets will be allocated to the first 20 who register for the introduction.

Making Films for your Research:
Innovative Audio-Visual Practices – A CHASE Doctoral Training Day.

Birkbeck Cinema, 10.00-17.30 on Saturday, November 17, 2018, followed by a wine reception

Filmmaking research is a form of practice research that enquires into production practices, techniques, modes and genres used in cinema, television and online. The outputs are films that may include fiction, documentary and hybrid forms. Filmmaking research pushes at the boundaries of traditional filmmaking and traditional research methods by adopting distinct approaches to professional and critical practices. Filmmaking research is a developing area and films produced within the academy are growing in number. There is an increasing engagement with filmmaking as research method and films as outputs, by researchers from a range of disciplines. Film can provide a powerful means to explore issues, disseminate research and create impact.

In this event, we will screen examples of innovative audio-visual filmmaking research practice, have presentations by filmmaker-researchers about their work, and hold round tables.

Screen Studies Day

King’s  College London (Strand Campus) on 17th November 2018

This is a full-day event (9:30-20:30) aimed at PhD students doing research in film and screen media. The training offered will be most beneficial to students in the earlier stages of their studies.

The event is open to students from all CHASE institutions and is free to attend.

November Film Festival

22-25 November | Close-Up Film Centre in London

November Film Festival is an international festival for experimental film and artists’ moving image run by CHASE students.
There will be 8 programs of films in total, two on each day. A full program will soon be made available on: https://www.novemberfilmfestival.org/
The screenings will be free to attend and registration for them will be on first come first serve basis through the festival website.
On Saturday the 24th at 9pm, there will be a networking dinner event for CHASE students and the visiting filmmakers, for which you can register below.

The British Library Doctoral Open Days

The British Library is again running a series of Open Days for Doctoral Students, running from December 2018 – March 2019.

The British Library on April 5, London, England.

 

The British Library Doctoral Open Days are a chance for PhD students who are new to the Library to learn how to make the most of the Library’s research materials, get to grips with the practicalities of using the Library and its services, and find out how to navigate their physical and online collections. They are also a great opportunity to meet our expert and friendly staff and other researchers from all disciplines.

Each day concentrates on a different aspect of the Library’s collections and most take an inter-disciplinary approach.  Students are invited to choose the day they feel is most relevant to their studies.

All events take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre at St Pancras, London, except for the event on Wednesday 30 January 2019, which takes place at the Library’s site in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. This event is suitable for researchers of all disciplines and subject areas as speakers will also provide an overarching introduction to the Library that will be of interest to anyone planning to explore our collections for PhD research – whether that is in Yorkshire, in London or online.

For further details of the all Open Days and how to book please see the British Library website. Places cost £10.00 including lunch and refreshments.