Category: Events

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Event: Theodore Dreiser: from Transatlantic Censorship to Scholarly Editions – 20 May, London

The British Library will host Theodore Dreiser: from Transatlantic Censorship to Scholarly Editions this Friday at the Eccles Centre for American Studies. Tickets cost £8 / £6 /£5 . The event will be followed by a wine reception.

About the event

The team behind a new critical edition of his 1914 novel The Titan reveal the intriguing story of its publication. The American novelist Theodore Dreiser fought many battles against censorship, winning some and losing others. After Harper & Bros. suddenly dropped The Titan, having already typeset and printed 10,000 copies, it was the British publisher John Lane who stepped in to bring out the book.

Drawing on new research, Roark Mulligan traces why and how this happened, focusing especially on the influence of the American-born Emilie Grigsby, herself an author and a prominent London socialite friendly with King Edward VII, Rupert Brooke, and Henry James, whose early life is fictionalised in The Titan.

Jude Davies will talk about how the historical censorship of Dreiser’s novels affects contemporary readers. Focusing on the critical editions of Sister Carrie and The Titan, he will examine how successive editors have grappled with the questions of which text to use and how to present it to readers.

About the speakers

Jude Davies is Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Winchester, and General Editor of the Theodore Dreiser Edition.

Roark Mulligan is Professor of English, Christopher Newport University, and is volume editor of The Financier (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and The Titan (University of Winchester Press, 2016).

Details and how to book

When: Friday 20 May, 18.30-20.00

Where: British Library Conference Centre

Tickets: £8 / £6 /£5 

Further information and tickets are available at the British Library website.

This event is presented in collaboration with Winchester University Press.

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CFP: Literary Networks and Cultural Collaborations – Birkbeck, Oct 29

The Call for Papers is now live for Literary Networks and Cultural Collaborations: From 19th Century to the Present Day, a one day conference to be held at Birkbeck College, University of London on October the 29th.

Submissions are due by June the 10th.

About the conference

The event seeks to inspire new, creative ideas and discussion about ways in which we imagine, understand and position the network in relation to literature and other forms of cultural production.

Call for papers

Pierre Bourdieu’s work on an ‘expanded field of cultural production’ has done much to widen our understanding of the full range of cultural practitioners who ‘make’ a text, including publishers, patrons, reviewers, salonnieres as well as the writers themselves. The shift away from focusing on the work of the singular artist to a more collaborative understanding of cultural production has  also served a recuperative, often feminist agenda that has helped to bring the works of obscure or “lost” cultural practitioners to light. For example, Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers in Writing for Their Lives (1987) explore the ‘hidden network’ of women who formed an alternative cultural alliance to the well-documented Bloomsbury Group in the first half of the twentieth century.

Yet there remains more work to be done to fully understand and conceptualise the strategies, technologies and spaces that enable cultural and literary networks to operate. How can we map and make sense of these relationships and the enabling forces that brought them into being? How have these changed over time? After the intense ferment of activity, collaboration and mutual service and reciprocity that is known to have characterized modernist relationships in the early 20th century, how do networks of writers and other cultural figures operate in today’s digital, hyper-global, fast-paced world?

With the rise of inter- and trans-disciplinarity as a site of study, the network provides an opportunity to bridge gaps between literary theory and exciting developments in cultural theory, anthropology, social science, medical practice, and more. We might therefore ask: what does Foucault’s theory of ‘constellations of power’ mean in the context of cultural networks? How can Bruno LaTour’s ‘actor-network-theory’ be used to re-interpret and re-assess modes of cultural collaboration? What new avenues of thought might Tim Ingold’s anthropological definition of ‘the meshwork’ take us down?

We welcome papers that offer new perspectives on well-known networks as well as those that uncover unusual or less well-known alliances, relationships and cultural constellations. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • Network theory as applied to literature – social, anthropological, scientific, cultural and political
  • Representations of “networked thinking” in literature
  • Clinical networks in the field of medical humanities
  • Mutual influence, reciprocity and support between groups or writers or cultural practitioners
  • The cultural work of collaboration and promotion
  • The cultural significance of friendships
  • The politics of patronage
  • Salon and coterie culture
  • Epistolary networks
  • Postcolonial networks
  • Digital Humanities and the network
  • Technologies, spaces and geographies that enable networks
  • National and transnational networks

How to submit

For this one-day conference at Birkbeck, we invite 300 word proposals for previously unpublished 20-minute papers that inspire new thinking about how we imagine, understand and position the network in relation to literature and other forms of cultural production.

Proposals should include a short biography and be sent via e-mail to literarynetworks2016@gmail.com

Submission deadline: Friday 10th June 2016

Conference organisers: Leonie Shanks and Laura Cushing-Harries

Further information is available on the conference website.

 

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Events Lecture

Modernist Perambulations – London, May 19

On 19 May, Professor Anne Fuchs FBA MRIA will give a lecture exploring the figure of the walker in modernist and contemporary literature at the British Academy in London.

About the event

Modernity celebrated speed as the motor of progress and a source of pleasure unleashing vitality and energy. But speed also provoked a new desire for slowness to allow modern selves to cope with the frantic pace of transformation. Hence the emergence of the modern walker who, for example, strays through texts by Benjamin, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Thomas Mann and Robert Walser. Focusing on diverse types of walking such as urban perambulations, rural rambling, disorientated straying, imprisoned crawling and condemned walking, my lecture examines the aesthetic and moral implications of perambulating through time and space.

About the speaker

Anne Fuchs FBA MRIA is Professor of German at the University of Warwick. Prior to her present post, she lectured at the University of St Andrews and at University College Dublin. Her research areas are German Memory Discourses since 1945, modernism, contemporary German literature, travel writing and cultural theory.

Details

Thursday 19 May 2016, 6-7.15pm, followed by a reception
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Chaired by: Professor Ann Jefferson FBA, University of Oxford and Paris Institute of Advanced Studies

The event is free to attend and no registration is required. Seats are allocated on a first come, first served basis. Further information is available on the British Academy website here.

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Event: Radio Modernisms

RADIO MODERNISMS:

Features, Cultures and the BBC

 

British Library, 19 May 2016,

to be followed by an early evening listening event

 

A University of Westminster CAMRI conference organised by

Aasiya Lodhi, Lecturer in Radio and Journalism, and Amanda Wrigley, Research Fellow.

 

The recent, welcome surge of academic interest in the early decades of radio broadcasting has led to a re-evaluation of the theories, methodologies and historiographies used in scholarly considerations of radio programming, personnel and audiences across the twentieth century. Not only is radio becoming more firmly situated in its proper place within the media ecology of the last century, it is also increasingly located in its various cultural, creative, educational and political ‘ecologies’. Radio as a thing experienced and made sense of by individual listeners is, importantly, receiving renewed attention (e.g. Kate Lacey’s 2013 Listening Publics), and there is a broader acknowledgement of the inherent modernism of the medium and its forms in this period, in addition to its innate intermediality.

Taking its cue from an important strand in this new wave of work (e.g. Todd Avery’s 2006 Radio Modernism, and the edited collections Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, 2014, and the 2015 Modernist Cultures special issue on radio), this one-day conference aims to interrogate emerging and pluralistic conceptions of radio modernism, especially in relation to the BBC’s radio feature programmes. As a creative nucleus, the personnel, editorial strategies and programming of the Features Department, to its closure in 1964, offer rich points of focus for British broadcasting’s complex entanglements with late modernism. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of specialists, the conference will explore, both through close reading and examination of wider cultural contexts, notions of remediation, intermediality, broadcast vernacular, emotion, listening constituencies, spatiality, technoculture, and more, with a view to encouraging further scholarly engagements with the various interpretations and interplays of ‘radio modernisms’ in twentieth-century Britain.

Todd Avery (Massachusetts Lowell) will give a keynote on engagements with literary modernism in The Listener editorials, Hugh Chignell (Bournemouth) will reassess the demise of the Features Department in 1964, Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes) will examine radio drama and its relationship to features in the 1940s, David Hendy (Sussex) will speak on the emotional mood of the pioneering generation of BBC workers, Kate Lacey (Sussex) will explore the ‘vernacular modernism’ of the broadcast flow of pre-war radio, Alex Lawrie (Edinburgh) will consider audience response to literary features, Aasiya Lodhi (Westminster) will examine transnationalism in Louis MacNeice’s travel features, Henry Mead (Teesside) will discuss Orwell and poetry, Amanda Wrigley (Westminster) will explore the Nachleben of features and John Wyver (Westminster) will explore the translation and transformation of ‘pure radio’ techniques to ‘poetic’ television documentaries.

 

Booking for this one-day conference will open shortly. To register your interest and reserve a place, please email amandawrigley@gmail.com.

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Event: Surrealist Topographies

Surrealist Topographies

At the Maison Française in Oxford
15th April 2016, 1.45-6.30pm
Organised by Nathalie Aubert and Eric White, Oxford Brookes University
The main aim of this symposium is to create an understanding of the Surrealist movement as a network and explore its topographies. For a long time, phrases like the ‘British literary diaspora’ have been used to describe ‘the great flight of writers from England’ in the 1920s and 30s, rather than there being an alternatively-viewed sense offered of the active quest for engagement with the continent. Most of these artists headed for the Continent, thus creating a bridge between a number of European capitals (among other destinations). It was not a one-way bridge however: the two wars for example were responsible for the arrival of refugee European intellectuals in London, who were influential in changing the artistic landscape of the Uk’s capital. This symposium hopes to provide an opportunity to examine Surrealism and its engagement in London, Paris and Brussels, and seeks to explore the extent to which interactions between artists and poets in England, France and Belgium produced a range of practices with a common core. As an interdisciplinary, multilingual event it brings together literary and visual arts experts from Britain and overseas to map the transnational contours of Surrealist theory and practice.
Speakers include: Paul Aron (Université Libre de Bruxelles); Fabrice Flahutez (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre); Stephen Forcer (Birmingham University); Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute, London); Effie Rentzou (Princeton University); and Nicole Sierra (King’s College London).

The symposium is free to attend but registration is essential. A limited number of travel bursaries will be made available to postgraduate delegates; if you wish to be considered for one then please provide a 2-sentence description of your Doctoral or Masters’ project with your registration email.
Please contact Nathalie Aubert <naubert@brookes.ac.uk> or Eric White <ewhite@brookes.ac.uk> by Friday 8 April to register your place.

Programme
From 1.45 Introduction
2pm-2.35pm Paul Aron (Université Libre de Bruxelles): “Le rôle de la scène médiatique lors de la fondation du surréalisme”
2.35pm-3.10pm Stephen Forcer (Birmingham University): “Birmingham to Paris (Not) Via London: Surrealism & the Bohemian of Balsall Heath”
3.10pm-3.45pm Nicole Sierra (King’s College London): “Of Parables and Patronage: Leonora Carrington & Edward James”
3.45-4.25pm Coffee/Tea
4.25-pm-5pm Effie Rentzou (Princeton University): “The topography of the international: Surrealist Exhibitions”
5pm-5.35 Fabrice Flahutez (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre): “De Temps mêlés à Phantomas : un aller-retour Paris-Belgique”
5.35pm- 6.20pm Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute, London): “Surrealist Rauschenberg: Poetics and Politics in the 1960s”
Closing remarks

All best wishes,
Eric
—

Dr. Eric White
Senior Lecturer in American Literature
Subject Coordinator, MA in English

Oxford Brookes University
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THIS WEEK: From Bright Young Thing to Last Rites: the Evelyn Waugh Collection

From Bright Young Thing to Last Rites: the Evelyn Waugh Collection

 

Wednesday, 23 March 2016, 13:00 to 16:00
Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, University of Leeds
 
 
Special Collections at the University of Leeds houses one of the best Evelyn Waugh collections in Europe. To celebrate the opening of the marvellous new Treasures of theBrotherton exhibition space, and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death, Alexander Waugh, Martin Stannard and Barbara Cooke of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project will be discussing the collection’s gems including the manuscript of Vile Bodies, the only complete Waugh manuscript to still reside in the UK, and rare copies of magazines produced by the author in his youth. Supported by the AHRC.
 
To book your free place, search ‘Waugh’ on Eventbrite
 
 
Dr Barbara Cooke
Research Associate, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh
School of English, University of Leicester, 
University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
T: +44 (0) 0116 229 7568
E: bc144@le.ac.uk
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Event: Flying Through the 30s

Flying through the ’30s

a one-day symposium on air travel and interwar Britain

 
16 April 2016
The Aerodrome Hotel, Croydon Airport
London
 
In his seminal British Writers of the Thirties, Valentine Cunningham notes the ‘airmindedness’ of the decade; this one-day symposium aims at exploring the role held by flying in interwar Britain—actual, textual, material, cultural. Held at Croydon Airport, a key site for aviation in interwar Britain, the conference will explore the texts and contexts that help to examine the impact of air travel on art, literature, film, space, perception and production.
Including papers on W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Rex Warner, David Garnett, Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, Paul Nash, Victor Canning, Louis Lumière, Amateur Film, and Documentary.
To register: http://onlinestore.ucl.ac.uk/  (Search terms: Flying through the ’30s)
 
Registration
£35 Standard
£30 Speakers
£25 Students
 
Registration fee includes three-course lunch, coffee and tea breaks, and tour of the Croydon Airport and Museum.
 
For full programme: www.flyingthroughthethirties.wordpress.com
Organisers
Dr Michael McCluskey (UCL)
Dr Luke Seaber (UCL)
Dr Amara Thornton (UCL)
Dr Debbie Challis (Croydon Airport Society)
 
Questions?
flyingthroughthethirties@gmail.com
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Events Seminars

Kinesthetic Modernism, Weds 2 March

Dear colleagues

Just a reminder that the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will host Robin Veder (Penn State Harrisburg), speaking on ‘Embodied Elitism, Energy Regulation, and the American Audience for Modernism’.

Wednesday 2 March, 6 pm, Senate House, London, Room 261

Abstract
Early twentieth-century American modernists – artists, art critics, art models, and art historians – reified the American taste for modernism in an embodied elitism. Key figures in the American avant-garde repeatedly formulated modernist aesthetic experience in terms of somatic self-consciousness, specifically kinesthesia, the sense of movement. By learning to regulate postural alignment and breath, they cultivated and controlled kinesthetic responsiveness, a practice that perfectly complemented the ‘introspective’ protocol of experimental physiological psychology, which American university laboratories were conducting and dispersing to the art community via theoretical and pedagogical texts. Veder contends that in both the body cultures of modernity and the physiological aesthetics of modernism, the concept of ‘poise’ figured as a discourse of energy regulation. Building upon Bourdieu, Veder shows that in this context, the hexis of poise accompanied the habitus of physiological aesthetics, both contributing to a new kinesthetic category of elite identity formation.

Robin Veder is Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the College of William in Mary, and she has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism, Harvard’s Garden and Landscape Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks, and in spring 2016, the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University. She is author of several articles on transatlantic art history, visual culture, history of the body, and landscape studies of the long nineteenth century, appearing in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, American Art, Visual Resources, Journal of Victorian Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and International Journal of the History of Sport. Veder’s book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy, was published by the Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England’s Visual Culture Series in 2015.

For more details and information about other sessions, see:https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

And you can follow us on Twitter @Litviscult

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
Royal Holloway, University of London

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Events

New IES Seminar Series: Comparative Modernisms

The IES is pleased to announce the start of a new seminar series on Comparative Modernisms:

 

Far from being just an isolated aesthetic movement of the early twentieth century, Modernism is now recognized as an international phenomenon spreading across all art genres and aspects of modern life with a determining effect on contemporary cultural and artistic practices. Moreover, new research into Modernism, exploring its historical, philosophical, empirical alongside aesthetic contexts within modernity, further confirms the necessity for a global, interdisciplinary approach to examine the movement’s multiple and intriguing ramifications.

 

The new Seminars Series in Comparative Modernisms, launched by the Institute of English Studies in 2016, stresses both modernism’s continuing relevance in the present and its complex, relational nature which calls for a comparative perspective. It provides a forum for ground-breaking multidisciplinary, transnational and inter-textual research in modernist studies by inviting English and international speakers as well as hosting a variety of associated events, such as roundtables, workshops and colloquia.

 

The thematic of the series cuts across modernist literature, art and culture and accommodates research that speaks to contemporary issues, such as, modernist legacies, translatability and reception, European and international modernisms, inter-mediality, history and form, science and  technology and the performance of modernity, by drawing on different theories, disciplines and modes of thinking.

 

Comparative Modernisms seminar series is convened by Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, a Visiting Research Fellow at IEL/SAS and Assist. Professor of European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University.

 

All seminars and events are held in the Senate House, London. The seminars and some of the associated events are FREE and open to all.  However, for reasons of room capacity, it is advised that you register your participation in advance at:angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk

 

Upcoming seminars:

 

Monday 22 February 2016, 18:00-20:00, Room 246

Catherine Bernard, Denis-Diderot University (Paris 7)

Modernist politics of translation: ‘Hanging suspended without attachment’

—–                                                                                                  

Tuesday 1 March 2016, 18:00-20:00, Room 104

Rachel Bowlby, UCL-Princeton University, BA Fellow

The Psychological Moment: the early modernist turn to psychology

—–

 

Future confirmed speakers include:

 

Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London

Jane Goldman, University of Glasgow

Laura Marcus, Oxford University

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Events

Virginia Woolf & Music

Please find below a quick update about the concert series ‘Virginia Woolf & Music’ which begins on March 4th in St Andrews.

The website for the concert series is now live and can be found at:

http://virginiawoolfmusic.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk

Additionally, Special Collections staff are going to present highlights from the Kirkpatrick Archive, recently acquired by St Andrews University Library, at the Symposium ‘Woolf and music’ on the afternoon of March 3rd. This will be the first chance to see some of the collection of about 70 Bloomsbury letters plus two previously unknown photographs of Woolf. The Symposium is free but registration is required: please contact lmg3@st-andrews.ac.uk for details.

Other events include a pre-performance talk and a small exhibition, ‘Virginia Woolf & St Andrews’. These promise to be really enjoyable so we do hope to see some of you in St Andrews.

With good wishes, Emma Sutton

School of English, University of St Andrews