Category: Seminars

We are excited to welcome two speakers to our next session:

‘They couldn’t see the forest for looking at the trees’: Emily Carr’s colonial modernism
Prof. Angela Smith (Stirling University)

D.H. Lawrence and visionary awareness: “not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle”
Elliott Morsia (Royal Holloway, University of London)

For further details please see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

The first London Modernism Seminar of 2014-15 will take place on Saturday 3 October at 11-1pm in Room 349 at Senate House, London. The theme of the seminar is Modernism and Science and we are very pleased to welcome as speakers Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London) and Max Saunders (Kings College London). You can find abstracts and speaker biographies below. The titles of the papers are:

Esther Leslie, ‘Liquid Crystal Lives in Modernist Europe’

Max Saunders, ‘Human Sciences: the idea of science in C. K. Ogden’s “To-Day and To-Morrow” Book Series’

The seminar is open to everyone who is interested in modernism, and you can find directions to the venue on the Institute of English Studies website: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/about-us/contact-us

Best wishes,

The Seminar Organisers

—

Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary, University of London, s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk

Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London, t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk

David Ayers, University of Kent, David Ayers, dsa@kent.ac.uk

Rebecca Beasley, Queen’s College, Oxford, rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk

Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, University of London, h.carr@gold.ac.uk

Peter Fifield, Birkbeck, University of London, p.fifield@birkbeck.ac.uk

Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), ‘Liquid Crystal Lives in Modernist Europe’

In 1933 Alfred Doeblin wrote a virtually unread book titled Unser Dasein, Our Existence. It was a compendium of scientific reflection, fiction, philosophy, philosophical pronouncement. It fell victim to political circumstances, but it also evades all the disciplinary certitudes and so slips through the cracks between disciplines. This paper explores it as a contribution to a ‘liquid crystal’ discourse that operates on the fringes of scientific and cultural analysis in Europe between the wars, a quest that was as significant politically as it would come to later be technologically.

ESTHER LESLIE is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also written a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands:Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion) appeared in 2005. Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage was published by Unkant in 2014.  She has translated and edited a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on photography (Reaktion, 2015) and a book on liquid crystals is forthcoming.

Max Saunders (KCL), ‘Human Sciences: the idea of science in C. K. Ogden’s “To-Day and To-Morrow” Book Series’

The  “To-Day and To-Morrow” series, edited by C. K. Ogden for Kegan Paul from 1923-31, included over 100 pithy volumes outlining the present state of the topic at issue, combined with a projection of its future. Some of the most influential volumes in the series were devoted to science, such as those by J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, James Jeans and J. D. Bernal. Though the majority of the volumes (some 80%) were on other topics, this paper will argue for a scientific paradigm as a primary motivation of the series; and for an appreciation of the significance of the series as a contribution to thought about modernity and the future.

MAX SAUNDERS is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, where he teaches modern literature. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press 2010); the editor of five volumes of Ford’s writing, including an annotated critical edition of Some Do Not . . . (Carcanet, 2010), and has published essays on Life-writing, on Impressionism, and on a number of modern writers. He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2008-10 to research the To-Day and To-Morrow book series; and in 2013 an Advanced Grant from the ERC for a 5-year collaborative project on Digital Life Writing called ‘Ego-Media’.

From Renaissance to Referendum: Poetry, Culture, and Politics

At the Scottish Poetry Library, 2015-16

www.renaissancetoreferendum.blogspot.com

Throughout 2015-16, the Scottish Poetry Library will host the public seminar series From Renaissance to Referendum: Poetry, Culture and Politics in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, supported by the British Academy, and by Edinburgh University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund.

Across the course of six free, evening events, poets and critics will introduce some of the most important and exciting areas of debate around the relationships between poetry, culture and politics in twentieth-century and contemporary Scotland, setting up open audience discussions on these themes. We hope these events will bring new critical and creative voices from the University and beyond into the Scottish Poetry Library’s newly renovated discussion and performance space. Staff and students are encouraged to come along to listen, talk, and drink wine!

Our six events will be spread throughout the academic year 2015-16:

The Scottish Renaissance and the Origins of Scottish Nationalism

1 October 2015, 6.30-8 pm, Saltire Society, 22 High Street, EH1 1TF

The Languages of Scottish Poetry

22 October 2015, 6.30-8 pm, Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, EH8 8DT

Contemporary Scottish Poetry and Ecology

12 November 2015, 6.30-8 pm, Scottish Poetry Library

Women’s Voices in Modern and Contemporary Scottish Poetry

4 February 2016, 6.30-8 pm, Scottish Poetry Library

Poetry and the Referendum: 2014 and After

25 February 2016, 6.30-8 pm, Scottish Poetry Library

Poetry, Culture and Politics in the Scottish Sixties

17 March 2016, 6.30-8 pm, Scottish Poetry Library

To find out more about the series and book ticket, visit

www.renaissancetoreferendum.blogspot.com

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.eventbrite.co.uk

Email any queries to Greg.Thomas@ed.ac.uk

Please find attached the programme for the forthcoming NMS hosted by Northumbria University at the Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne and supported by the North East Modernist Research Initiative. This event is free but for catering purposes please register your attendance to Victoria.Bazin@northumbria.ac.uk

Northern Modernism Seminar Northumbria

Everyone is welcome to come along this coming Monday (8 June) at 5.30 to the final Book History Research Group seminar of the year at Senate House, London. Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University) will be talking about the use of scrapbooks by Virginia Woolf and others: full details below. No need to register!

Monday 8 June 2015

Time: 5.30-7.00pm

Venue: Room G34, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU. Tel. 0207 8628675

Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University)

Writing with Scrapbooks: Cutting, Pasting, and Authorship

Nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper readers cut up their reading and made scrapbooks from it in both the US and the UK. They used these scrapbooks as records of their interests and activities, as mediated by the press. Ordinary readers also did this to keep track of information, and to speak back to the media in a variety of ways. Scrapbooks kept by authors tracked their own published writing and collected news items for possible future incorporation into their works. Scrapbook-making British writers included Virginia Woolf, Charles Reade, and Lewis Carroll. This talk will discuss ways that writers used scrapbooks and consider how scrapbooks can complicate our ideas of authorship.

Ellen Gruber Garvey is is Professor of English at New Jersey City University and Visiting Professor at the Université Paris 8/Vincennes-St. Denis for the Spring 2015 semester. Her most recent book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2012) won four awards, including the Institute for Humanities Research’s biennial  Transdisciplinary Book Award and the Society of American Archivists’ Waldo Gifford Leland Award. Her previous book, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, 1996) won the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) prize for the year’s best book on book history. She has also written on American abolitionists’ use of newspapers as data, the advertising of books, and on women editing periodicals. She has written for the New York Times Disunion blog, Slate, and The Root, has held the Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands and is co-editor of the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

This year’s Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History Research Group seminar series is ‘Paper, Pen and Ink 2: Manuscript Cultures in the Age of Print’. More details at http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/research-seminar-series/paper-pen-and-ink-2

If you have any queries about this seminar or the Book History seminar series in general, please contact Jonathan Gibson (jonathan.gibson@open.ac.uk)