TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities: Recent Episodes
Oxford University
The University of Oxford is home to an impressive range and depth of research activities in the Humanities. TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities is a major new initiative that seeks to build on this heritage and to stimulate and support research that transcends disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Here we feature some of the networks and programmes, as well as recordings of events, and offer insights into the research that they make possible.
Contemporary poets read from their translations of the Purgatorio and from their poems about Dante. After Dante: Poets in Purgatory, edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O'Donoghue, was published by Arc Poetry in July and marks the 700th anniversary of the poet's death in exile at Ravenna on 14 September 1321. This new complete version of Dante's Purgatorio is by sixteen contemporary poets who enter into dialogue with the original by rendering it into a variety of Anglophone voices: American, Australian, British, Irish, Jamaican,Scottish, Singaporean.
The video of the launch (on 10 November 2021) includes nine of the poets reading parts of the cantos they have translated and some of their poems about Dante's Purgatory; it also features poems by a predecessor and a contemporary of Dante. The programme begins with an introduction to another book on Dante's work: John Dickson Batten: Illustrations for Dante's 'Inferno', edited by Pater Hainsworth, also published this year (by Panarc International). The event was supported by TORCH, the Oxford Dante Society and Lady Margaret Hall.
Speakers/contributors (alphabetical order): Jane Draycott; Steve Ellis; Andrew Fitzsimons; Lorna Goodison; Peter Hainsworth; Nick Havely; Angela Jarman; Jan Kemp; Jamie McKendrick; Bernard O'Donoghue; A.E. Stallings; Patrick Worsnip.
A Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences event. Shifting the question from ‘how should climate change be put into the curriculum?’ to ‘how does it transform the curriculum?’ opens up the subject in new ways across the world. How does it change the way in which each subject (including humanities) is conceptualised, taught and related to other subject areas? What education do students need to equip them with the information, critical abilities and practical adaptability to build liveable futures? How can they develop the skills and vocabularies to deal with emotions around instability, uncertainty and loss? In the coming decades, what will employers want from their employees? What will drive sustainability and innovation in the world of work? What effects will choices embedded in curricula have on the capacity of societies to adapt to change and to manage it in ways that are just and productive? Educators and makers of education policy need a clear picture of the purpose of education in these contexts as well as a nuanced sense of what roles educators can and should play. Countries like the UK have been slow to introduce these issues into education systems, so what can be learned from educators in countries and regions that have been at the forefront of this thinking?
Participants: Rahul Chopra (IISER, Pune; TROP ICSU project) Kim Polgreen (Wytham Woods/Oxford teachers) Amanda Power (History, Oxford) Steve Puttick (Education, Oxford) James Robson (SKOPE, Oxford) Arjen Wals (Wageningen, NL; UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development) Chair: William Finnegan (OUCE, Oxford)
Learn more about the Climate Crisis Thinking i the Humanities and Social Science here: torch.ox.ac.uk/climate-crisis-thinking-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences
Oxfordshire Local historian, Mark Davies, takes a look at the history of Medley Manor and its connections to empire as well as his own family history.
Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, day 3, held on 16th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Chair: Dr Nina Whiteman Speaker: Dr Des Oliver On our final day, we begin with a keynote lecture from composer Dr Des Oliver on his ‘Diasporic Quartets’ projects. You can learn more here https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/diversity-and-the-british-string-quartet-0#/
Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, held on 14th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Lecture by Professor Laura Tunbridge (University of Oxford)
Chair: Dr Wiebke Thormählen (Royal College of Music)
We will hear from Beethoven and string quartet expert Prof Laura Tunbridge on the history of performing quartets working in UK universities.
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), award-winning poet, lyricist, musician, and activist Benjamin Zephaniah speaks out candidly about the writer’s responsibility to step outside the medium of literature and engage in political activism: “You can’t just be a poet or writer and say your activism is simply writing about these things; you have to do something as well, especially if your public profile can be put to good use.” In conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Malachi McIntosh, he will address the complex relationship of authorship and activism in a celebrity-driven media culture and the ways in which his celebrity persona relates to his activist agenda. The conversation will tie in with contemporary debates about the role of literature and the celebrity author as a social commentator.
Pre-recorded introduction:
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author and editor of over twenty books, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (2002), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015), Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century critical readings (2018), and a widely translated biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the award-winning author of five novels, including Bloodlines (2000), Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), and two collections of short stories, most recently To the Volcano, and other stories (2019). Boehmer is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and principal investigator of Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds.
Speakers:
Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain’s most eminent contemporary poets, best known for his compelling spoken-word and recorded performances. An award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s author, and musician, he is also a committed political activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights. He appears regularly on radio and TV, literary festivals, and has also taken part in plays and films. He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.
Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature.
Q and A Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director.
The event is organised in association with the Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project and The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and forms part of the webinar series Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture.
Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book:
The emancipatory promise of liberalism - and its exclusionary qualities - shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
Speakers:
Professor Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She is currently completing a three year Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, working on a new book on liberalism and the Jews, tentatively titled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector, she is also leading a major four year AHRC-funded project on Jewish country houses.
Professor Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy. His fields of interest include the history of ideas and culture in Europe between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, with a particular focus on nationalisms and fascism; the history of the Jews and of Anti-Semitism; the history of the Holocaust; the history of historiography, and questions of historical method. His many publications include, most recently, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy.
Professor Adam Sutcliffe is Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London. His research has focused on in the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 1650 and 1850, and on the history of Jews, Judaism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Europe from 1600 to the present. Professor Sutcliffe’s most recent publication, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose, is a wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking on the purpose of the Jewish people.
Dr Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history, with particular interest in theories of freedom in modern political thought. His book Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity will be published from Princeton University Press in autumn 2021.
A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France’ by Professor Neil Kenny. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book:
It is easy to forget how deeply embedded in social hierarchy was the literature and learning that has come down to us from the early modern European world. From fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history, works of all kinds emerged from and through the social hierarchy that was a fundamental fact of everyday life. Paying attention to it changes how we might understand and interpret the works themselves, whether canonical and familiar or largely forgotten. But a second, related fact is much overlooked too: works also often emanated from families, not just from individuals.
Speakers:
Professor Neil Kenny is a Professor of French at Oxford University, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. He specialises in early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Professor Kenny’s current focus is on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy and previous projects have investigated different kinds of knowledge and belief.
Professor Caroline Warman is a Professor of French Literature and Thought at Oxford University, and President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She specialises in the circulation of ideas and materialist thought and has recently completed a book on Diderot called The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot and the ‘Eléments de physiologie’.
Professor Ceri Sullivan is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and the author of five books on the literary features that structure early modern texts about religion, trade, bureaucracy, and rhetoric. She is the general editor of the English Association's series Essays and Studies and her most recent publication is Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City by Durs Grünbein, translated by Professor Karen Leeder. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book:
Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry.
Published in English for the first time, this translation by Professor Karen Leeder marks the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing.
Panel includes:
Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry.
Durs Grünbein was born on 9 October 1962 in Dresden. He is one of the most important and internationally powerful German poets and essayists. After the opening of the Iron Curtain, he traveled through Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He was a guest of the German Department of New York University and The Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His books have been translated into several languages. He lives in Berlin and Rome.
Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The
White Road (2015). His new book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011 and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. Born 1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London.
Professor Patrick Major is Professor of History at the University of Reading, where he is also an associate of the East German Studies Archive. His research interests are primarily the political, social and cultural history of divided Germany in the Cold War. He has published on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and Hollywood's depictions of 'bad Nazis' and 'good Germans', and is currently researching the bombing of Berlin in the Second World War.
A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism’ by Professor Rana Mitter. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book:
For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization - and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Professor Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home.
China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim.
The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.
Speakers:
Professor Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford. His books include China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist, and China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking/BBC Arts and Ideas Podcast.
Professor David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund’s College Oxford. His research specialises in communism and market liberalism, especially in the communist and post-communist worlds. His publications include a comparative history of communism, The Red Flag:
Communism and the Making of the Modern World, and Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power, a study of the history of market liberalism and its place in global history.
Professor Vivienne Shue is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary China Studies and Emeritus Fellow of St Anthony’s College Oxford. Her current research examines certain distinctively 21st century Chinese governance techniques and practices, including high-tech national development planning. Her publications include The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, and most recently To Govern China, co-edited with Professor Patricia Thornton. She is the former director of Oxford’s Contemporary China Studies Programme.
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This panel discussion and conversation with artist Khaled Kaddal examines The Formula of Giving Heart as a piercing study of our contemporary socio-political environment. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and creative perspectives, the panellists variously explore such themes as the global increase in physical confinement(s), the rise of cybernetics and biodata, and the continued privileging of contemporary science/medicine as distinct from other historical practices of healing. Exploring these phenomena amid a backdrop of global precarity, The Formula for Giving Heart forges fascinating linkages between seemingly disparate phenomena. It demonstrates how spatial imprisonment exists in and through hyperlinked and technologized (global) networks, ancient Pharaonic languages map onto and exist as contemporary (computer) code, and apparently distinct socio-political events—from the Coronavirus pandemic to the 2011 Egyptian revolution—can feel familiar through the very extraordinary nature of their temporal and affective regimes. Exploring these themes through the world premiere of Kaddal’s newest work, this panel broadly considers our present moment as well as the shifting nature of sonic and visual performance during a time of global crisis and ever increasing technologization.
Christopher Haworth is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham. His scholarly interests lie in the broad areas of electronic music and sound art, which he researches using a mixture of historiographic, philosophical, and ethnographic research methods. He is currently researching the short-lived 'cyber theory' moment that accompanied mid-1990s hype for the internet and World Wide Web in Britain, and he was previously an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow on Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. He also composes computer music, often incorporating principles from psychoacoustics, music psychology, and cybernetics.
Khaled Kaddal is a Nubian visual artist and sound performer, raised in Egypt and currently resident in London. Allaying science and politics, spirituality and technology, he works with two interdependent abstractions; ‘Immortality of Time’ and ‘Sovereignty of Space’, in search for the imperishable balance between intelligence, emotions and moral judgments. Recent solo show at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen; group exhibitions include ‘One the Edge’ at Science Gallery, London; ’10 Years of Production’ at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; ‘What do you mean, here we are?’ at Mosaic Rooms Gallery, London; ‘Art Olympics’ at Tokyo Metropolitan ArtMuseum, Tokyo; Performances at ‘Keep quite and Dance’ at Cairotronica Symposium, Cairo; Zentrum der Kunster Hellerau, Dresden; and ‘Daily Concerns’ at Dilston Grove Gallery, London. Kaddal has an upcoming show at 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, Morocco; and a Resident Fellow at Uniarts Helsinki, Finland. He studied Computer Science at AAST (EG), and Sound Art at the University of the Arts London (UK).
Darci Sprengel is an ethnomusicologist and Junior Research Fellow in Music at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Her research examines contemporary music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism, and politics. She is currently completing her first book, 'Postponed Endings': Youth Music and Affective Politics in Post-Revolution Egypt, which examines Egyptian independent music in relation to conditions of military-capitalism. She has two additional research projects. The first analyses music streaming technologies in the global South using a feminist and critical race approach to digital media. The second explores the influence of sub-Saharan African culture in Egyptian popular culture.
Christabel Stirling is a musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to music and sound art in contemporary urban environments. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism’, based at the Music Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the social relations and coalitions that music and sound produce in their live forms, focusing particularly on the potential for such coalitions to transform or reinforce existing social and spatial orders.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown will feature the author James Attlee in discussion with Marina Warner and Professor Pablo Mukherjee (Warwick University). Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director.
This event is also in collaboration with Blackwell's of Oxford. Blackwell's of Oxford has been selling books on Broad Street for over 140 years making it Oxford's oldest bookshop. With over five miles of books in the Broad Street flagship, Blackwell's booksellers' passion for the putting right book into the right reader's hands is undiminished after over a century. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown is for sale at Blackwell's Bookshop on Broad Street. Call 01865 792792 for a copy signed by James Attlee and if you live within the Oxford ring road, Blackwell's will deliver it to you by bike. Alternatively, you can place an order online at Blackwells.co.uk.
Speaker Panel: James Attlee is the author of Under the Rainbow:Voices from Lockdown; Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017, and Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer’s Confession won the 2017 New Media Writing Prize. He works as an editor, lecturer and publishing consultant and his journalism has appeared in publications including The Independent, Tate Etc., Frieze and the London Review of Books.
Marina Warner is an acclaimed polymath: a writer of fiction, criticism history, and mythography; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales. She has written for many publications, from The London Review of Books, through the New Statesman, to Vogue, and is a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Professor Pablo Mukherjee teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program at Warwick University, and is an expert on Victorian as well as contemporary imperial/colonial and anti-imperial/colonial cultures.
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Named after the original title of Richard Rathbone's book on Nana Ofori Atta I, the King of Akyem Abuakwa in Ghana, this talk will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of Nana Oforiatta Ayim's celebrated novel The God Child. Both books have the kingdom as their centre, with Nana Oforiatta Ayim's book drawing on that of Richard Rathbone, as well as on her family's memories, for her fictional narrative.
In this live event the two discuss the interplay of academia and fiction and how narratives are shaped and reshaped according to the telling. They also talk about the nuances of privilege, leadership, and of royalty within a West African kingdom and how this has evolved through time. Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Special Advisor to the Ghanaian government on Museums and Cultural Heritage, leading the country's museums restructuring programme. She is also Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021. She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, is a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020.
Richard Rathbone
Richard Rathbone was born in war-time London. His father and mother worked for the BBC but during the war his father was an RAF pilot and he was killed soon after my birth. His childhood was largely spent in and around London. In 1964 Richard began his research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He was appointed o teach in the history department at SOAS in 1969, where he worked until early retirement in 2003. During that time Richard served as Chairman of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and as SOAS' Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was promoted to a chair in modern African history in 1994. Life was episodically interrupted by a series of research trips to Ghana and a variety of fellowships to universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto.
Richard's current appointments include Emeritus professor and professorial research associate at SOAS and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University. He has also served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
Chaired by Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven
Dr. Laura Van Broekhovenis the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professorial Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Previously she led the curatorial department of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, was Senior Curator for Middle- and South America and was departmental lecturer in archaeology, museum studies and indigenous heritage at Leiden University. Laura strives to develop a more equitable decolonised praxis in museums including issues around shared and negotiated authority; restitution, reconciliation and redress and the queering of exclusionary binaries and boundaries with relation to social justice and inclusion. Her regional academic research has focused on collaborative collection research with Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania; Yokot’an Maya oral history, Mixtec Indigenous market systems and merchant biographies, and Nicaraguan Indigenous resistance in colonial times. She serves on numerous advisory boards, is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN) and the European Ethnographic Museum Directors Group and is co-chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network.
Elise Busset, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in french. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70
Eleanor Gilbert, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in english. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations.
Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies.
The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not.
Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English.
On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857.
Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University.
The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27.
Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University.
Further reading:
The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot=
Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902)
Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Thursday 13th May 2021. Join us for a fascinating evening with award-winning playwright and actress Lolita Chakrabarti in conversation with journalist Matt Wolf. Streamed live from an Oxford venue and chaired by Dr Sos Eltis, the event will cover Lolita’s wide-ranging career and hone in on her most recent play, Hymn, at the Almeida Theatre.
Lolita Chakrabarti is an award-winning playwright and actress. Writing credits include the award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi, which will open in the West End in 2021, the ambitious Invisible Cities (MIF), Hymn (Almeida) and Red Velvet, which opened at the Tricycle Theatre before transferring to London’s West End and New York. Acting credits include playing Queen Gertrude, opposite Tom Hiddleston, in Sir Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (RADA), Fanny & Alexandra (Old Vic) and Free Outgoing (Royal Court). A Casual Vacancy (BBC1/HBO), To Provide All People (BBC2), Beowulf (ITV), Jekyll and Hyde (ITV), Riviera (Sky), Criminal (Netflix) and Defending The Guilty (BBC).
Matt Wolf is an American theatre critic based in London, where he has spent his entire professional life. He moved to the UK directly upon graduating from Yale, where he read English and was co-arts editor of the Yale Daily News (a good place to begin). Soon upon arrival in London, he found work in a self-created job as arts and theatre writer for the Associated Press (AP), where he remained for 21 years.
Along the way, following brief stints at the Wall Street Journal/Europe and The Hollywood Reporter, Matt became London theatre critic for Variety from 1992-2005, during which time he was freelancing regularly for The International Herald Tribune – now the International New York Times. Following the departure from his long-held post of the august Sheridan Morley, Matt became London theatre critic for the IHT/INYT, and in 2009 was thrilled to help birth The Arts Desk – an arts-centred website that within a few years of its inception was named best specialism journalism website at the Online Media Awards in London. He remains theatre editor at that site and reviews there across the cultural spectrum.
In addition to his journalism, Matt has collaborated on two books – one about Guys and Dolls, the other about Les Miserables – and is the author of Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom, an account of the theatre and film director Sam Mendes’s extraordinary tenure at one of London’s premier theatrical addresses. Matt sits on the panel of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and is on the faculty of both NYU/London and the V&A Museum; he can be heard regularly on various radio programmes for both the BBC and Monocle.
Following an acclaimed, sold-out live-streamed and on-demand runs, Lolita Chakrabarti's Hymn will be broadcast on Sky Arts on Sunday 18 April at 9pm. The world premiere of this production was directed by Blanche McIntyre and features actors Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani. Sky Arts is free to watch on Freeview Channel 11. Sky and NOW subscribers can also watch Hymn on-demand after the broadcast.
Lolita Chakrabarti is a HCP Visiting Fellow part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England.
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Oliver Ready (St Antony’s College) and Sasha Dugdale (Writer in Residence, St John’s College, Cambridge), two leading translators from the Russian, will discuss their work
This event is part of the Russian and Slavonic Research Seminar series which is kindly supported by the Ilchester Fund. The convenors of the series are Professor Catriona Kelly and Professor Philip Bullock. To find out more about the series, visit their webpage here. https://www.ongc.ox.ac.uk/event/russian-and-slavonic-research-seminar
Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection, Deformations (Carcanet 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Her translations include work by Vasily Sigarev, Elena Shvarts, Tatiana Shcherbina, and most recently, Maria Stepanova (The War of the Beast and the Animals, Bloodaxe, 2021 and In Memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo, 2021).
Oliver Ready’s translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment ('A truly great translation . . . This English version really is better', A. N. Wilson, Spectator), And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories by Nikolai Gogol, and Vladimir Sharov (‘the clarity and directness of Sharov's prose – wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready’, Rachel Polonsky, NYRB).
Held on International Women's Day 2021, Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities - in collaboration with Lincoln College, Oxford. Talk and Performance from Dr Samantha Ege, Lincoln College Oxford.
In celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March 2021), Dr. Samantha Ege presents an hour-long lecture-recital. Therein, she traces the lives and legacies of Black women composers in Chicago. The music of Florence B. Price, Nora Douglas Holt, Margaret Bonds, and Betty Jackson King represents the foundations of a vibrant creative network. Dr. Ege contextualises this in the transformative movement of the Negro Renaissance.
Programme:
Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G minor (1932) Fantasie Nègre No. 3 in F minor (1932)
Nora Douglas Holt (c.1885-1974)
Negro Dance (1921)
Betty Jackson King (1928-1994)
Four Seasonal Sketches (1955)
I. Spring Intermezzo
II. Summer Interlude
III. Autumn Dance
IV. Winter Holiday
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)
Spiritual Suite (1967)
I. Valley of the Bones
II. The Bells
III. Troubled Water
Dr. Samantha Ege is Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. Her research focuses on Florence B. Price and the network of female practitioners in the age of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She released the album Four Women: Music for Solo Piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland and Bonds with Wave Theory Records in 2018.
Dr. Ege's new album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price will be released digitally on the LORELT label on Monday 8 March to coincide with the celebration of International Women's Day. This event is kindly supported by Lincoln College, Oxford, Lord Crewe’s Charity and the Zilkha Trust.
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Performing Innocence: Belated
Abstract:
Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman’s writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the third in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914
Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Abstract:
Projections of different ideas of innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive” identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated, while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US community in Paris.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Dr. James Smalls is an art historian, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in the art and visual culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone Press, 2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He has published essays in a number of book anthologies and prominent journals, including American Art, French Historical Studies, Third Text, Art Journal, and Art Criticism. His book chapters and articles include: Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism (2016), The Soft Glow of Brutality (2015), A Teacher Uses Star Trek for Difficult Conversations on Race and Gender (2015), Racial Antics in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture (2014), Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé (2013), and Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn (2013). Smalls is currently completing a book entitled Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism.
In 2006, Smalls curated a two-part exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art on the art, career, and international influence of the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner. In 2009-2010, he served as the Consulting Editor for the five-volume set of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. In 2015 he was appointed to the Advisory Board for The Archives of American Art Journal.
Dr. Smalls holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Ethnic Arts (B. A.), and Art History (M. A., and Ph.D.). He has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and at the University of Paris.
Professor c, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the second lecture in the The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 series. Moderator: Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Performing Innocence: Puritan
Abstract:
Visual culture representing Americans in Paris often polarized stereotypes of French and US identities, framing French bohemia as distinct from steadfast US work ethic. This lecture analyzes how Americans and US institutions in Paris adopted the ideal of the Puritan as a symbol of their sustained connection with the United States and a protective armor from becoming absorbed into Parisian decadence. US churches in Paris—all Protestant—participated in this construction alongside offering critiques of Catholicism in the context of debates about laicization in France. Professor Burns analyzes paintings, sculpture, and illustrations by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Cecilia Beaux, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Jean André Castaigne, and studies St. Luke’s Chapel, which was built for the US students in Paris, to argue that this discourse inflected US artists’ representations of their studio spaces; the rhetoric of US artists’ clubs in Paris; and limited professional possibilities for US women artists.
Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University
Having earned a BA (l963), MA (l965) and Ph.D. (l974) from New York University, Professor Wanda Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From l992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center.
A scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography, Professor Corn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Regents, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute of Art. In 2003 she was the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College and in 2006-07, the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. In 2012, she was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship to support her pioneering research on Georgia O’Keeffe’s clothes. She has won numerous teaching awards: in 2007 The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association; in 2002 the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award; and in 1974 the Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities. In 2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and in 2007 she received the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2014, the College Art Association dedicated a Distinguished Scholar Session to her work. She has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association and two on the Commission for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served on the Advisory Board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné and two terms on the Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art. Today she is a trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art; and a board member of the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) that is an affiliate of the National Trust.
Active as a guest curator, she had produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories (2011-12); and in 2017-19, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. Her O’Keeffe study, published by Prestel Press, won Honorable Mention for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and was awarded the 1918 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her historiographic article for Art Bulletin, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art" (June l988), became a significant point of reference in the field as has her work on cultural nationalism in early American modernism. Her study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. In 2011, UC Press published Professor Corn’s Women Building History about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. She continues to research, write, and lecture on high, middle, and low culture interpretations of Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised.
Performing Innocence: Baby Nation
Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's College
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract:
French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond.
Alastair Wrights's research focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.
History DPhil student, Morgan Breene, contextualizes the catamaran displayed in the Pitt Rivers' Museum. Part of the Oxford and Empire series.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Dr Ushashi Dasgupta. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction. In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. In Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction, Dr Ushashi Dasgupta demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Panel includes: Dr Ushashi Dasgupta is the The Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her research centres around nineteenth-century fiction, specialising in the relationship between literature, space and architecture, in particular, the ways in which fiction articulates urban and domestic experience. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction is her first book, and her next project asks what it means to feel at home in a book, exploring the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor Sophia Psarra is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design at University College London. Her research is transdisciplinary, spanning architecture and urbanism, spatial morphology, history, and cultural studies, and has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, NSF-USA and the Onassis Foundation. Professor Psarra is also a prize-winning practicing architect, and her work has resulted in creative installations and design projects as well as a number of publications, which include The Venice Variations and Architecture and Narrative. Professor Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic who has been engaged with education and teaching at all levels and across the range, including holding the Chair of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and of Literature in Manchester. As a literary scholar, he uses critical and cultural theory, especially the culture of cities, and particularly that of London, as a way of approaching writing on many forms and periods of literature, as well as film and opera. Professor Tambling’s many publications include, most recently, Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Sophocles: Antigone and other tragedies by Professor Oliver Taplin. With panellists Professor Karen Leeder and Dr Lucy Jackson. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men-or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Professor Oliver Taplin's original and distinctive verse translations of Antigone, Deianeira and Electra convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Panel includes: Professor Oliver Taplin is an Emeritus Professor of Classics at Oxford University. His research has focused on the reception of poetry and drama through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times. He co-founded the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and has collaborated on a number of high-profile theatre productions. In recent years he has turned his attention to translating Greek Drama as verse to be spoken and performed. Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Dr Lucy Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance, neo-Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in the sixteenth century, and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds. Her most recent publication is The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE.
At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another member of the resistance circle. Further arrests followed. From 15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the events as they happened in real time through daily posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It’s also a year when the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following Monday morning.
At the heart of our week is a live reading of the White Rose’s resistance pamphlets, translated from German into English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka, Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund. It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences.
Dr Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the White Rose’, in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA.
Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at the Queen’s College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad Project Prize 2019–20.
Sophie Caws is a final year student of French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as a beginner’s language, she now studies modern German literature with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second Language. She was also involved in English-language community theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig community and beyond.
Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at King’s College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and Interbellum literature more broadly.
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
TORCH Goes Digital! presents Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In this joint event between St Peter's College and TORCH, distinguished and multi-award-winning British filmmaker, social campaigner and St Peter’s College alumnus, Ken Loach (Jurisprudence, 1957), will discuss his filmmaking career with Professor Judith Buchanan, Master of St Peter’s College Oxford. Their conversation will concentrate on two remarkable films: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England.
Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
Internationally-renowned composer Anne Boyd is in conversation with composer Thomas Metcalf, discussing her life and music ahead of a performance of her String Quartet No. 2 ’Play on the Water’ later this year. This is part of the TORCH project ‘Pixelating the River’: Engagement with Contemporary Music through Graphical Inputs, played by the Kreutzer Quartet, alongside a new work by Thomas Metcalf.
Professor Anne Boyd AM is one of Australia’s most distinguished composers and music educators. Her undergraduate studies were in the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, where Peter Sculthorpe was her earliest and most influential composition teacher.
The award of a Commonwealth Scholarship enabled her to undertake a PhD in composition at the University of York (1969-72), where her supervisors were Wilfrid Mellers and Bernard Rands. In 1990, Boyd became the first Australian (and the first woman) to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney. Before this, she was the Foundation Head of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong (1981–90) and taught at the University of Sussex (1972–77).
The hallmarks of her musical style are its transparency, gentleness and delicacy, attributes which reflect her long involvement with Asian traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia.
Two solo CDs of her music are Meditations on a Chinese Character (ABC Classics, 1997) and Crossing a Bridge of Dreams (Tall Poppies, 2000).
Professor Boyd was honoured with an AM in the Order of Australia in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2003, the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA-AMC Classical Music Awards in 2005 and the 2014 Sir Bernard Heinz Award for service to music in Australia.
Biography taken from Faber Music, 2021
Thomas Metcalf is a composer and DPhil candidate in Music at Oxford University (Worcester College), where he is researching the transformation of graphical spaces into determinately–notated music – focusing on a range of composers in the 20th and 21st centuries. His research has been recognised in the UK and internationally, appearing in peer-reviewed journals as well as diverse conference settings in Europe.
Beginning his composition training with Robert Saxton at Oxford in October 2014, Thomas subsequently achieved a first–class BA in Music and an MSt in Composition with distinction as the Ogilvie–Thompson Scholar of Worcester College. Since January 2020, Thomas has studied with Kenneth Hesketh, focusing specifically on graphical methods of determinate composition, a process that is present in much of Hesketh’s recent work.
Thomas’s works have been performed by a variety of ensembles, such as the ANIMA Collective, BBC Singers, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, GBSR Duo, Oxford Philharmonic, St. Pancras Parish Church Choir, and the Villiers Quartet. He has worked with composers such as Judith Weir, Michael Zev Gordon, Henning Kraggerud, and Dario Marianelli. He has also collaborated with festivals such as Oxford Lieder Festival (2018), Oxford Chamber Music Festival (2019), and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (as part of the Peter Reynolds Composers Studio) (2020).
Dr Juliet Henderson and Florence Park community members discuss their new project to decolonise local street names.
Local historian, Liz Woolley, takes a closer look at the role Lord Nuffield played in changing the city of Oxford's physical and social landscape.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on The Political Life of an Epidemic – Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe written by Professor Simukai Chigudu. About the book: Zimbabwe's catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008–9 saw an unprecedented number of people affected, with 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Cholera, however, was much more than a public health crisis: it represented the nadir of the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008. This study focuses on the political life of the cholera epidemic, tracing the historical origins of the outbreak, examining the social pattern of its unfolding and impact, analysing the institutional and communal responses to the disease, and marking the effects of its aftermath. Across different social and institutional settings, competing interpretations and experiences of the cholera epidemic created charged social and political debates. In his examination of these debates which surrounded the breakdown of Zimbabwe's public health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order, the scope and limitations of disaster relief, and the country's profound levels of livelihood poverty and social inequality, Simukai Chigudu reveals how this epidemic of a preventable disease had profound implications for political institutions and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Panel includes: Professor Simukai Chigudu is an Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony's College. Prior to academia, he was a medical doctor in the National Health Service where he worked for three years. He is principally interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa, which he examines using disease, public health, violence, and social suffering as organising frameworks. He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, The Gambia, Tanzania and South Africa. Professor Sloan Mahone is an Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford University. She specialises in the history of psychiatry and neurology in Africa as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry globally. Her current research projects, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and Oxford's James Martin School, involve the implementation of oral history programmes on epilepsy in Africa and in resource poor settings globally. She is a member of Oxford's Epilepsy Research Group. Professor Mahone has also worked extensively in historical research and community development in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar.
Doctor Jon Schubert is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Brunel University. He is a political and economic anthropologist working on state institutions, infrastructures, and transnational trade in Angola and Mozambique. He is the author of Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola and has previously held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Leipzig and Geneva.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, written by Dr Priya Atwal. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet.
Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British.
Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed.
Panel includes:
Dr Priya Atwal is Community History Fellow at Oxford. She is a historian of empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. She has taught History at King's College London and Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research has been featured in collaborative projects with Historic Royal Palaces, among others; and she makes regular broadcast appearances, most recently presenting the BBC Radio 4 series, Lies My Teacher Told Me. She tweets @priyaatwal.
Professor Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History and the Director of the Asian Studies Centre at Oxford. His research focuses on political thought in modern South Asia, and is more broadly concerned with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of four books, most recently Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and was formerly Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
Professor Polly O’Hanlon is a Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford and co-course director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the social and intellectual history of India. Her most recent book was At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, which explores new approaches to questions about caste, gender, and religious cultures across a range of historical environments.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, TORCH is delighted to support the Annual Besterman Lecture, 2020 Lecture by Professor William Doyle. Introduced by Karen O'Brien (Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University) and Gregory S. Brown (General Editor of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Senior Research Fellow, Voltaire Foundation). Moderated by Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University.
When Napoleon in 1799 declared that the French Revolution was over, he said that was because it was now established on the principles with which it began. The implication was that much of what had happened over the preceding decade of upheaval had not been in accordance with those principles. Napoleon took care, of course, not to state what they were: his constitution was the first since 1789 not to contain a declaration of basic rights. Yet everyone during the Revolution claimed to be acting on revolutionary principles, or denounced their opponents for betraying them. Can we distinguish between those who held to and those who ignored or compromised revolutionary aspirations? This lecture will make the attempt, challenging some of the most enduring assumptions in revolutionary historiography.
Professor William Doyle
Professor William Doyle is Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol. Professor Doyle is a British historian, specialising in 18th-century France, and is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition, 1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018). Professor Doyle one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, 1775-1790 - he is also the author of sixteen books on French and European history, five of which have been translated into Chinese. Professor Doyle is also a fellow of the British Academy and a co founder of the The Society for the Study of French History.
Introduced by:
Karen O'Brien, Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University. Before taking on this role in 2018, Professor O’Brien was Vice Principal (Education) and Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London. At King’s she oversaw institutional strategy for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, the university Maths school, admissions and widening access, and the financing and implementation of student-facing capital projects. She implemented major changes in the areas of online degrees and digital learning, new classroom and clinical teaching spaces, careers and co-curricular learning. Prior to this, she was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birmingham University and held academic posts at Warwick, Cardiff and Southampton Universities. Originally educated at Oxford, she held a Harkness fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge where she is now an Honorary Fellow. She is a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, a trustee of Chawton House, a member of Princeton University Press’s European advisory board and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In addition to being Head of the Humanities Division, she is a professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the historical writing and fiction of the period.
Professor Gregory S. Brown, Professor of History; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Senior Research Fellow; Voltaire Foundation and general editor of OSE.
He is author, with Isser Woloch, of Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (2nd edition; Norton, 2012), and author of Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood, 2003); and A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (Columbia, 2002). Professor Brown will be delivering the ASECS-BSECS lecture at this winter's virtual BSECS conference, on the intellectual origins of "eighteenth-century studies.
Moderated by:
Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. Lauren R. Clay is an historian of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout France and the French empire during the prerevolutionary era. Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History by the American Society for Theatre Research and was named a finalist for the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association. Her article “Provincial Actors, the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005) was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has a chapter on Voltaire’s fortunes at the box office forthcoming in Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793/Données, recettes et répertoire. La scène en ligne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Eds. Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel (MIT Press, 2020).
Lauren's work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Slavery and Abolition, and The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Currently, she is writing about the debate over the legality of the slave trade during the early French Revolution. Lauren completed her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she spent several years teaching at Texas A and M University. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches courses on the history of early modern France, the economic history of the eighteenth century, revolutions in the modern world, European imperialism, and the history of Paris. She is a past Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.
Local historian, Liz Wooley, takes a closer look at the role Lord Nuffield played in changing the city of Oxford's physical and social landscape.
Dr Dexnell Peters, Bennett Boskey Fellow in Atlantic History at Exeter College, reflects on the life and enduring legacy of eminent historian, Dr Eric Williams.
Dr Ben Grant, departmental lecturer in English and author of Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009) reflects on Richard Francis Burton's sojourn in Oxford in the 1840s.
Historian, Dr Priya Atwal, takes a look at the lives of some of the University of Oxford's first Indian students.
This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones of the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme. Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This talk accompanies the 2020 Photo Oxford festival, Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen. Biographies:
Geoffrey Batchen is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018).
Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her monographs on photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson / Japanese version with Seigensha 2018), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (Georg Olms 2011), and Yasumasa Morimuras Self-Portrait as Actress: Überlegungen zur Identität (VdM 2008).
Talking Afropean: Johny Pitts in conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Simukai Chigudu about his award-winning book. TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events!. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
This Writers Make Worlds and TORCH panel discussion features the author Johny Pitts in conversation about his ground-breaking travelogue Afropean, his 2019 notes on a journey around contemporary Black Europe.
Johny Pitts will explore together with Oxford academics Simukai Chigudu and Elleke Boehmer questions of black history, hidden archives, decolonization and community, and what it is to be black in Europe today. Hailed as a work that reframes Europe, Afropean was the 2020 winner of the Jhalak Prize.
Biographies:
Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist, and the author of Afropean (2019). His work exploring African-European identity has received numerous awards, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He has contributed words and images to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times.
Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian, and critic. She is Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent books are Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and To the Volcano (2019). She is currently on a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship working on a project called ‘Southern Imagining’.
Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Simukai is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa and his first book The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe came out in 2020. Prior to joining the academy, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe written by Professor Judith Herrin. Date: 4 November 2020. Book at Lunchtime https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/book-at-lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book: From 402 AD until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy. In Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures and the pivot between East and West. The book offers a fresh account of the waning of Rome, the Gothic and Lombard invasions, the rise of Islam and the devastating divisions within Christianity. It argues that the fifth to eighth centuries should not be perceived as a time of decline from antiquity but rather, thanks to Byzantium, as one of great creativity - the period of 'Early Christendom'. These were the formative centuries of Europe.
Author Judith Herrin won the Heineken Prize for History (the 'Dutch Nobel Prize') in 2016 for her pioneering work on the early Medieval Mediterranean world, especially the role of Byzantium, the influence of Islam and the significance of women. She is the author of Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, The Formation of Christendom, A Medieval Miscellany and Women in Purple. Herrin worked in Birmingham, Paris, Munich, Istanbul and Princeton before becoming Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London until 2008, where she is now the Constantine Leventis Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Classics.
Panel: Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is also Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia and beyond, and on relations between Christianity and Islam. His books The Silk Roads (2015) and The New Silk Roads (2018) received huge acclaim. He writes regularly for the international press, advises governments on geopolitics, and is chair of this year's Cundill History Prize.
Professor Dame Averil Cameron was Warden of Keble College, Oxford from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King's College London where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. She has been President of CBRL (Council for British Research in the Levant) and FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d'études classiques) and is currently President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.
Dr Conrad Leyser is Associate Professor of History at Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of History at Worcester College. He specialises in the religious and social history of the Latin West in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (300-1100). His current research project centres on celibacy and the professionalisation of the priesthood in the so-called 'unreformed' Church of the tenth century. He is the author of Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great and the co-editor of England and the Continent in the Tenth Century.
Dr Joseph Moshenska, Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at University College, discusses his new book, Iconoclasm as Child's Play. Drawing on a range of sixteenth-century artifacts, artworks, and texts, as well as on ancient and modern theories of iconoclasm and of play, Iconoclasm As Child's Play argues that the desire to shape and interpret the playing of children is an important cultural force. Formerly holy objects may have been handed over with an intent to debase them, but play has a tendency to create new meanings and stories that take on a life of their own.
Joe Moshenska shows that this form of iconoclasm is not only a fascinating phenomenon in its own right; it has the potential to alter our understandings of the threshold between the religious and the secular, the forms and functions of play, and the nature of historical transformation and continuity.
Panel includes: Dr Joseph Moshenska is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at University College. Joe grew up in Brighton, and as an undergraduate he read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After graduating he went to Princeton, initially for a year as the Eliza Jane Procter Visiting Fellow, and stayed there to complete his PhD. From 2010 to 2018 he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Joe joined the Oxford Faculty in 2018. In 2019 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Professor Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. She was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford and has repeated that pattern in her career, having taught at Berkeley, St Andrews and now Oxford. Professor Hutson is a Fellow of the British Academy and works on English Renaissance literature. She has written on usury and literature, on women’s writing and the representation of women, on poetics and forensic rhetoric and, most recently, on the geopolitics of England’s ‘insular imagining’ in the sixteenth century.” Professor Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as Chair of the Faculty of History. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017. Professor Kenneth Gross is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His critical writing ranges from Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, to modern poetry, theater, and the visual arts. His books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and most recently Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, winner of the 2012 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He’s also the editor of John Hollander’s 1999 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History. Gross has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study Center, the Princeton Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. Gross has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study Center, the Princeton Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Professor Matthew Bevis is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Keble College. He is the author of The Art of Eloquence, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, and, most recently, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago University Press, 2019). His recent essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper's, Poetry, and The New York Review of Books. He’s currently working on Knowing Edward Lear for Oxford University Press, and a book On Wonder for Harvard University Press.
Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 'Liveness'. Biographies:
Katie Mitchell is a British theatre director whose unique style and uncompromising methods have divided both critics and audiences. Though sometimes causing controversy, her productions have been innovative and groundbreaking, and have established her as one of the UK’s leading names in contemporary performance.
She was born in Berkshire in 1964, grew up in the small village of Hermitage and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. She began her theatre career in 1986 with a job at the King’s Head Theatre as a production assistant. She became an assistant director at Paines Plough a year later, and then took the same post at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. In 1990, she founded her own company, Classics on a Shoestring, where she directed a number of pioneering and highly acclaimed productions including the House of Bernada Alba and Women of Troy.
In the decades with followed, Mitchell worked as an associate director with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Whilst at the RSC, she was responsible for programming at the now defunct black box space, The Other Place, and her production of The Phoenician Women earned her the Evening Standard Award for Best Director.
Her numerous theatre credits include 2071 and Night Songs for the Royal Court, The Cherry Orchard for the Young Vic, The Trial of Ubu for Hampstead Theatre, Henry VI Part III (to date her only Shakespeare production) for the RSC and A Woman Killed with Kindness and The Seagull at the National Theatre. She has also directed opera, working with the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. An exponent of Stanislavski techniques and naturalism, her style was strongly influenced by the time she spent working in Eastern Europe early in her career. Her work is characterised by the creation on stage of a highly distinctive environment, the intensity of the emotions portrayed and by the realism of the acting.
Mitchell’s work has pushed boundaries and explored technique and, not just confined to the stage, has also taken her into other creative mediums. She has directed for film and television with work including The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Turn of the Screw. In 2011, together with video maker, Leo Warner, Mitchell devised an immersive video installation called Five Truths for the Victoria and Albert Museum which explored the nature of truth in theatrical production.
Ben Whishaw is a multi-award winning English actor in film, television, and theatre. He trained at RADA, and his work in theatre quickly brought acclaim including a much-lauded Hamlet at the Old Vic with Trevor Nunn in 2004. He has been directed by Katie Mitchell multiple times, including The Seagull at the National Theatre in 2006, and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at the Shed in New York last year. In television his work ranges from BAFTA-winning performances in Rupert Goold's Richard II for the BBC in 2012 to A Very English Scandal in 2018. Among many film roles, he is perhaps best known for taking on the part of Q in the Bond films since 2012’s Skyfall and for delighting audiences young and old as the voice of Paddington in the hit movies in 2014 and 2017.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Drama Week Biographies: Fiona Shaw CBE
Fiona Shaw is an actor and theatre and opera director. She is known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–10), as Marnie Stonebrook in season four of the HBO series True Blood (2011), and as Carolyn Martens in the BBC series Killing Eve (2018–present), for which she won the 2019 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. For her performances in the second seasons of Killing Eve and the comedy-drama Fleabag, Shaw received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series respectively.
Fiona has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. She won the 1990 Olivier Award for Best Actress for various roles, including Electra, the 1994 Olivier Award for Best Actress for Machinal, and the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for The Waste Land. Her other stage work includes playing the title role in Medea in the West End and on Broadway (2001–02). She was awarded an Honorary CBE in 2001. In 2020, she was listed at number 29 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Professor Oliver Taplin, Emeritus Professor of Classics, Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Oliver Taplin is a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Professor Taplin's main teaching has been in all aspects of ancient Greek epic, tragedy and comedy: Classics, Classics (and Joint Honours), Classics and English, Classics and Modern Languages, Classics with Oriental Studies at Oxford University.
Oliver's primary focus as a scholar is on Greek drama, especially from the viewpoint of staging and performance. His first book was The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, in which he dealt with the entrances and exits of characters in Aeschylus's plays. Subsequent books, including Comic Angels (1993) and Pots and Plays (2007) examine vase paintings as evidence for the performance of tragedy and comedy. In 1996, together with Edith Hall, he set up the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama). It is devoted to the international production and reception of ancient plays since the Renaissance. He has also worked with productions in the theatre, including The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1980–81), The Thebans at the RSC (1991–92), and The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1999–2000). Apart from Greek drama, his chief area of interest was in Homer.
Oliver retired as Tutor in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2008. The same year, Oxford University Press published Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson.
Further related subjects include vase-painting and theatre; performance studies; reception of ancient literature in modern poetry; practical translation workshops. Currently he is working on a broad-brush book on Greek Tragedy, including a critique of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Publications include:
The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977, reissued as a paperback 1989). Greek Tragedy in Action (London and Berkeley 1978; revised edition 1985); also translated into Greek, Japanese and Polish. Greek Fire (London 1990); also translated into Dutch, Portuguese, French, German and Greek. Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford 1992, reprinted in paperback, 1994). Comic Angels – and other approaches to Greek drama through vase-painting (Oxford 1993, reprinted in paperback, 1994). Pots and Plays. Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century BC (Getty Museum Publications, Los Angeles, 2007) Sophocles Oedipus the King and other tragedies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2016) Aeschylus The Oresteia (Norton, New York, 2018) His new book, Sophocles' Antigone and Other Tragedies was published in September 2020.
Join us for an online TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War written by Dr Alice Kelly. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book:
One of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War provides the first sustained study of women’s literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.
Author Alice Kelly is currently a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, and the Communications Officer here at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literary and cultural history in Britain and America. As well as Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (2020), Alice has published a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2015), and essays on modernist and First World War literature. She has held Fellowships at Yale University, New York University, and a British Academy Rising Stars Award for her interdisciplinary seminar series Cultures and Commemorations of War.
https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/people/alice-kelly
Panel:
Michael Whitworth is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Virginia Woolf, with his most recent work being an edition of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day for Cambridge University Press (published 2018). His previous publications include Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature, and chapters on Oliver Lodge’s science writing and Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry. He is currently working a project concerning on science, poetry, and specialization in the early twentieth century,
Laura Rattray is Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow and Director of its Centre for American Studies. She has teaching and research interests in modern American literature and culture, women’s writing and gender, editing and publishing history. In 2016 she founded the Transatlantic Literary Women series, funded by the British Association for American Studies and US Embassy small grants programme. Publications include Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (co-editor with William Blazek), The New Edith Wharton Studies (co-editor with Jennifer Haytock) and The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, while her new monograph, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. Previously, Winter taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Yale. Winter is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Socialism and the Challenge of War; Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18; Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century; Rene Cassin and the rights of man, and most recently, War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from the Great War to the present.
Bàrbara Molas discusses Transnational Francoism: The British and The Canadian Friends of National Spain as part of the TORCH Network Conversations in Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood. Bàrbara Molas is a PHD Candidate in History at York University
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events!. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Join us to discuss Imagined Journeys: Pilgrimage, Diplomacy, and Colonialism in Medieval Europe - Professor Marion Turner (Faculty of English) in Conversation with writer Matthew Kneale.
In this event, Marion and Matthew discuss their recent books – Matthew’s novel, Pilgrims, and Marion’s biography, Chaucer: A European Life – both of which focus on medieval journeys across Europe. They will discuss different aspects of medieval travel – ranging from colonialism in Wales to the expulsion of the Jews from England, from diplomacy and cultural exchange to pilgrimage, both real and imagined. One of the issues underpinning their work, and this conversation, is the question of what it means to be English and what it means to be European – both then and now.
Biographies:
Professor Marion Turner, Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College and Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford
Marion Turner works on late medieval literature and culture, focusing especially on Geoffrey Chaucer. Her most recent book, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, 2019) argues for the importance of placing Chaucer in multilingual and international contexts, tracing his journeys across Europe and his immersion in global trade routes and exchanges. It was named as a book of the year 2019 by the Times, the Sunday Times, and the TLS, and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2020.
‘An absolute triumph’ A.N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
‘A quite exceptional biography,’ Wolfson History Prize judges
Matthew Kneale
Matthew Kneale was born in London in 1960, the son of two writers and the grandson of two others. His father, Nigel Kneale, was a screenwriter for film and television, best known for the ‘Quatermass’ series. Matthew’s mother, Judith Kerr, was the author and illustrator of children’s books including ‘The tiger who came to tea’ and ‘Mog the forgetful cat’ while she has also written three autobiographical novels, beginning with ‘When Hitler stole pink rabbit’.
From his earliest years Matthew was fascinated by different worlds, both contemporary and from the past. After studying at Latymer Upper School, London, he read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. During his university years he began travelling, seeing diverse cultures at first hand, in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Matthew's books include: Whore Banquets, Inside Rose’s Kingdom, Sweet Thames, English Passengers, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, When we were Romans and An Atheist’s History of Belief. Matthew's current novel, Pilgrims, explores medieval life, shaped by religious laws as well as personal battles and follows a fascinating cast of characters on a journey from England to Rome.
When not writing Kneale enjoys to travel and has visited some eighty countries and seven continents. He is also fascinated with languages, trying his hand at learning a number, from Italian, Spanish, German and French to Romanian and Amharic Ethiopian. Matthew currently lives in Rome with his wife, Shannon, and their two children, Alexander and Tatiana.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Join Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall, Oxford) and Tom Herring (Artistic Director of SANSARA) to discuss White Rose - Voices of the German Resistance.
In 1943 five students and a professor at the University of Munich were executed. They had been part of the White Rose, a group that secretly wrote and distributed pamphlets calling on Germans to resist Hitler. The White Rose Project, a research and outreach initiative led by Dr Alex Lloyd at the University of Oxford, works to bring the story of this incredible group to an English-speaking audience.
White Rose - Voices of the German Resistance is a collaboration between the White Rose Project and SANSARA, an award-winning vocal ensemble led by Artistic Director Tom Herring. This project combines the two performance forces of the spoken word and a cappella choral music to tell this remarkable story. Music is juxtaposed with excerpts from the resistance group’s letters, diaries and pamphlets. The majority of these texts are only now being translated into English by students at Oxford. The music gives a background to the texts and speaks in dialogue with them, creating resonances, dissonances, and a chance for reflection.
In this live event, Alex and Tom discuss their work together with short excerpts from their concert on 22 February 2020, SANSARA’s last live performance before lockdown. This short film gives a brief introduction to the project https://youtu.be/76vhQmHQR1o
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Translation Week Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This event presents a conversation between academic, translator and writer Karen Leeder and poet, performer and novelist Ulrike Almut Sandig who have been collaborating for the last eight years. Karen and Ulrike were due to appear together with Sandig’s poetry band LANDSCHAFT (with Grigory Semenchuk) at the Big Tent! in May 2020.
Ulrike Sandig is that rare thing: a writer who is as much at home on the stage as the page. She began as a guerrilla poet, pasting poems to lampposts, and today often collaborates with sound artists, musicians and filmmakers to take her poetry to the audiences that poetry doesn’t usually reach. Translation is a vital part of all this, not only at the most fundamental level of turning a feeling, image, or an idea into a poem on the page, but also carrying over that impetus into performance, the screen, a classical orchestra or an electronic hip hop band. She also works at translating older texts for contemporary times as with her Grimm cycle (published in English in 2018) which reanimates the dark side of the Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm for our own age. A further level comes with translation into English, which itself has become part of new collaborations - for example, in the animated poetry films by Beate Kunath & Eléonore Roedel that have taken their work to new audiences all over the world through the medium of English.
In this event, Karen and Ulrike will perform recent work, and discuss the creative transformations poetry can undergo, with emples from Ulrike’s work for page, stage, film and gig, along with their own creative process and the way poetry, that voice from the wings, can become part of an inclusive political project.
Biographies:
Professor Karen J. Leeder Karen Leeder started her academic life researching the samizdat poetry, art and music scene that existed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has continued her interest in the GDR and has published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods. She is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature and has been awarded residences in UK and Berlin. Most recently she won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for her translation of Durs Grünbein. Her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Thick of it (Seagull Books, 2018) won an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award, and was runner up for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (2019). Grimm appeared in a special limited edition with Hurst Street Books in 2018. Their new collaboration, due in Summer 2020, I am a field full of rapeseed give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil paintings laid one on top of the other is ‘hotly anticipated’ by the New York Times. She was TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre, London (2014-2015) and keeps up work especially with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry: http://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/.
Ulrike Almut Sandig (Poet) Born in rural Großenhain in former East Germany in 1979, Ulrike Almut Sandig started life as a kind of guerrilla poet, pasting poems onto lamp posts on the streets of Leipzig with friends and handing them out on flyers and free postcards. Two books of stories and four volumes of her poetry have been published to date, including, most recently, Ich bin ein Feld voller Raps verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt. Her first novel will appear this Autumn. Performance is a key part of Sandig’s work. She frequently collaborates with filmmakers, sound artists and musicians and her first CD with her poetry band LANDSCHAFT (with Grigory Semenchuk) appeared in 2018. Sandig has often appeared in the UK including at The Edinburgh Festival, Hay Festival, and StAnza and won many prizes, including the Leonce and Lena Prize (2009), the Literary Prize of the Federation of German Industries (2017), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2018) and the Horst-Bingel Prize (2018). She lives in Berlin with her family.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Performance Week. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Join us for an in-conversation with multi-award winning artist, Jamelia, as we explore themes related to music, performance, and what it means to be an artist on lockdown. Join Dr Yvonne Liao (Music Faculty, University of Oxford) and Dr Priya Atwal (Kings College London) as they discuss all things music, performance, representation, education, home schooling with Jamelia. Jamelia is a mutli-award winning musician, presenter and an advocate for women and girls. Her career has spanned over 20 years, beginning when she was just 15.
Jamelia has topped the charts in the UK, Australia, Thailand and Italy and toured the world with Usher, Destiny’s child and Justin Timberlake to name a few. She has received awards from The Mobo’s, Q Awards, Ivor Novellos and a Mercury Music Prize. Jamelia also models and has graced the covers of Elle, Cosmopolitain and Harpers Bazaar. Branching out into acting, presenting and writing, Jamelia uses her expansive career and life experience to empower, inspire and ignite those around her.
She has authored an array of documentaries including “Whose hair Is it Anyway” which she says was life changing for her, and the emotional “Shame About Single Mums” both for the BBC. As if the above wasn’t enough, Jamelia is a loving Wife, and describes her most important role as being “Mummy” to her 3 gorgeous Daughters and adorable Son. She sees her children as her greatest success!
Jamelia is currently working on multiple projects, including a new album, TV show, book, haircare line, and her Girlz Club Programs in partnership with her daughters’ business, Magic Girlz.
Dr Yvonne Liao is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Music Faculty at the University of Oxford. Yvonne is a music historian and during her career has also worked at Naxos Records and Universial Music Hong Kong. During her time in Oxford, Yvonne has also co-founded the Colonial Ports and Global Histories Network (CPAGH) and is a member of the TORCH Management Committee.
Dr Priya Atwal is a Teaching Fellow in Modern South Asian History at Kings College London. In addition to her research as a historian, Priya has a lot of experience working in the areas of public engagement, history, museums and heritage, and University outreach particularly including her research on Queen Victoria, and most recently appearing as part of the BBC4 documentary on 'The Stolen Maharajah'.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
In conversation with Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King. This event is also part of the North-east Africa Forum at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
Hosted by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English (English Faculty, University of Oxford). Professor Boehmer is currently the Director for the Oxford Centre for Life Writing (OCLW) based at Wolfson College, and former Director of TORCH (2015-17), and also leads on the 'Writers Make Worlds' project - https://writersmakeworlds.com/
Biographies:
Maaza Mengiste is the author of the novels, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books; and The Shadow King, a finalist for the LA Times Books Prize, a New York Times' Notable Book of 2019 and one of TIME's Must-Read Books of 2019. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and LiteraturHaus Zurich. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, amongst other publications.
In conversation with:
Birhanu T. Gessese Birhanu was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is now studying Humanities at Kenyon College, USA. He is currently on a year abroad studying English Literature at Exeter University, UK. He likes to compose stories, work with the camera, and illustrate in ink pen. Along with Korranda Harris, he recently interviewed Maaza Mengiste for Africa in Words.
Professor Richard Reid (History Faculty, University of Oxford) is a historian of modern Africa, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With a particular interest in the culture and practice of warfare in the modern period, part of Professor Reid's research interests includes the more recent armed insurgences, especially those between 1950s and the 1980s. https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-richard-reid
Professor Tsehai Berhane-Selassie Tsehai Berhane-Selassie taught social-anthropology, gender, and development studies in Universities in Ethiopia, the USA, the UK, and Ireland. She has published on Ethiopian Warriorhood, and gender issues in Ethiopia.
'The Shadow King' Synopsis:
Published by Canon Gate.
'DEVASTATING' Marlon James, 'A MODERN CLASSIC' Andrew Sean Greer, 'INCREDIBLE' Lemn Sissay, 'BRILLIANT' Salman Rushdie, 'MAGNIFICIENT' Aminatta Forna, 'EPIC' Mary Morris, 'WONDERFUL' Laila Lalami, 'UNFORGETTABLE' The Times, 'REMARKABLE' New York Times
ETHIOPIA. 1935.
With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy's most vicious officers?
The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.
What guerrilla gardening reveals about our relationship with urban nature and culture. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Dr Elizabeth Ewart, Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford joins JC Niala, one of her doctoral students to discuss human relationships to nature in cities. Dr Ewart has an interest in the anthropology of everyday practices such as gardening. JC Niala's doctoral research focuses on urban gardeners in Oxford and she is interested in the what their everyday practice reveals about the way we live.Working with the case study of guerrilla gardeners who operate in cities such as London and Oxford they will explore the interactions between different types of gardeners that challenge commonly held assumptions about nature and culture.
Biographies: JC Niala JC is a doctoral researcher with an interest in how people’s imaginations of nature, affects the environment. With a focus on urban practice, she has worked on food sovereignty projects in Kenya . JC has used verbatim theatre as a tool for community engagement with both adaptation and mitigation strategies for dealing with climate change. JC's current ecological project 'Plant an orchestra' brings together her love of music and trees.
Elizabeth Ewart Elizabeth Ewart is Associate Professor in the anthropology of Lowland South America. Her research is with indigenous people in Central Brazil where she has lived and worked with Panará people. She is interested in the material and visual aspects of Amerindian lived worlds, including body adornment, beadwork, garden design and village layout and is also interested in the anthropology of everyday practices, such as child rearing and gardening.
More recently, she has been developing research in southwestern Ethiopia (together with Dr Wolde Tadesse), on local agriculture and food production, specifically in relation to a local staple, enset (Ensete ventricosum or Abyssinian banana), exploring the manifold connections between cultivation, cooking, animal husbandry, land custodianship and sense of wellbeing among Gamo communities in the southern Ethiopian highlands.
In May 2020 a deadly tropical cyclone struck Eastern India and Bangladesh. Named ‘Amphan’ and classified as a ‘Super Cyclone’ this was almost certainly a climate change induced extreme event. This event was organised by the Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences Network https://torch.ox.ac.uk/climate-crisis-thinking-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences . The full scale of destruction caused by cyclone Amphan in India (the states of Odisha and West Bengal) and Bangladesh remains to be yet fully understood and tabulated. We bring together a panel of historians, geographers, and anthropologists who have longstanding research in the effected region of South Asia on related topics of ecology, climate change, human-animal relations, conservation, and the Anthropocene. This session is interested in probing the relationship between the climate crisis and the very specific history, politics, sociology, and ethnography of South Asia. As such it has two broad aims. Firstly, we try to shine light on the devastating effect of the climate crisis in South Asia. This is particularly important given the poor coverage the cyclone – its causes and the trail of devastation it has left in its wake – got globally and, even, regionally. As is the case with so much of the climate crisis there is a collective forgetting of its effects, especially when they take place in lands considered ‘Other’ or distant. This panel is but one small attempt to resist such collective forgetting. Secondly and Relatedly, as we note in the aims of our network, the academy is oftentimes too slow in responding to the climate crisis or does so in somewhat inaccessible forms. Through this discussion we get academics from across the Humanities and Social Sciences working on the environment and climate change to present their analyses to a global public. As such it constituted a demonstration of the ways in which careful Humanities and Social Science knowledge can contribute in a timely and engaged manner with what it means to live through the climate crisis. Panel Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University) Jason Cons (UT Austin) Annu Jalais (National University of Singapore) Megnaa Mehtta (Sheffield University) Kasia Paprocki (The London School of Economics)
Presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book. Contemporary letterpress artist David Armes (Red Plate Press) and book conservator Andrew Honey (Bodleian Libraries) share their appreciation for paper and for the craft and art that goes into the making of books. Armes explains how he printed a new book on 'Oxford India Paper,' very thin but opaque paper used to print Bibles, encyclopaedias, and other lengthy works. The resulting work, Curses, exploits the paper's unique qualities. Find out how demanding this was, and hear about Armes's printing residency in Oxford, where he created the work 'Between Sun Turns,' a response to the environment and cityscape in and around the city. It has been thought that ‘Oxford India paper’ was locally produced at the Wolvercote Paper Mill; Andrew Honey discusses this idea, and reveals other historical paper research taking place at the Bodleian.
Speaker Biographies: David Armes is an artist working with print, language and geography. His work is frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of place can be represented. He works primarily with letterpress printing on paper and, through using what was once an industrial process, he is interested in where the multiple meets the unique, where the ephemeral meets the archival. The final work varies in form and size from small chapbooks to large hanging scroll installations. He travels frequently for residencies and worked as artist-in-residence at Bodleian Libraries at University of Oxford (2019), Zygote Press fine art printmaking studio, Ohio (2018), BBC Radio Lancashire (2017) and Huddersfield Art Gallery (2016). He has recently shown work in the USA, UK and Germany, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award.
Andrew Honey is a book conservator at the Bodleian Libraries with a teaching and research role. He has recently completed the conservation and rebinding of the Winchester Bible and is the conservation advisor to The Mappa Mundi Trust. He has wide interests in the materiality of rare books and manuscripts, and a particular interest in historic paper. His paper research has ranged from the writing papers used by Jane Austen (Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, Oxford 2018) to the faults found in the Shakespeare’s First Folio (‘Torn, wrinkled, stained, and otherwise naughty sheets’ – how should we interpret paper faults in seventeenth-century paper)
OYUB is a Russian documentary play about the life of Oyub Titiev, a human rights activist in the Republic of Chechnya, Russia. ‘How much longer are we going to kill and imprison human rights defenders?’ ‘With every passing year, there are more and more restrictions, and less and less rights.’ Oyub Titiev, Shali Town Court, Chechnya, Russia, 18 March 2019.
Oyub Titiev's arrest and subsequent show trial in Chechnya in 2018-19 caught worldwide media attention and drew broad international criticism. Titiev was sentenced to four years imprisonment, but was released on parole three months later, having served out two years in detention since his initial arrest. In 2018, Oyub Titiev was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. He now lives in Moscow, where he continues his human rights work.
This radio play is read by current human rights activists, not actors (although one of the participants is both). It was recorded by the participants from their homes in the U.K. and Europe during the COVID-19 lockdown. The play was not rehearsed or directed, and is performed as a reading, rather than acted out. Emphasis is placed on the professional connection between participants and Titiev himself, and for this reason their biographies are included below.
The play features an introduction by Julie Curtis, who is a Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. Her work on contemporary Russian drama has been pursued in association with two AHRC (OWRI) research projects hosted by the Universities of Oxford (Creative Multilingualism) and Manchester (Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community). She is the editor of a volume of essays and interviews on this subject called New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), to which the translator of the play, Alex Trustrum Thomas, is a contributor.
The play text of OYUB is published by Bookmate Originals and is available as a free e-book in English and in Russian. This is part of a forthcoming anthology of Russian documentary plays being published later this year by Common Place (Moscow).
This project was supported by Creative Multilingualism, as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open World Research Initiative (OWRI).
N.B. Headphones are highly recommended for playback to hear the full range of sounds.
Participant biographies, in order of appearance:
Peter Wieltschnig is a human rights lawyer, focusing on human security in crisis and conflict as well as the right to water. He has worked on projects including: the protection and empowerment of refugees and displaced persons in Lebanon and Syria, the development of due diligence legislation to regulate the arms industry and States’ arms export regimes, the criminalisation of humanitarian assistance in Europe, and the human rights impacts of counter-terrorism legislation in Ireland and the UK.
Jacob Burns is a writer, researcher and journalist who has worked across the Middle East. Currently the Communications Advisor for Yemen, Iraq and Jordan at Médecins sans Frontières, he has previously worked for Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture.
Mistale Taylor conducts research into various areas of international criminal law and human rights law to provide pro bono legal advice for states, governments and NGOs in conflict/post-conflict situations in her role as Counsel at Public International Law and Policy Group. She has advised on, amongst other things, maritime piracy; the invocation of state secrets privilege to bar third party access to information in torture cases; and life sentencing practices in Europe. In her work at Trilateral Research, Mistale contributes to ongoing projects related to law, technology, privacy, data protection, human rights and ethics.
Sorcha Thomson is a PhD Fellow at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, researching anticolonial struggle, internationalist solidarity and revolutionary movements in Cuba and Palestine. She is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Youth and Student Committee, working to build and organise the next generation of support for Palestinian human rights and justice in the UK. She has worked with Amnesty International in Israel, Palestine and Scotland across a number of campaigns.
Rea Eldem lives in Berlin where she works as a gender equality strategist with a focus on working culture under the name in-visible. To her, addressing gender equality in the workplace means making visible normalised cultural practices, institutionalised dynamics and organisational structures that hinder women and other marginalised groups to strive forward. Although equal treatment and access to opportunities are basic human rights the discrimination of individuals based on aspects of their identity continues to persist in the workplace today.
Matthew Romain trained as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School after studying philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He has worked extensively in theatre throughout the UK including Shakespeare’s Globe and the Donmar Warehouse; screen credits include BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ and ‘World on Fire’. Matthew performed in the Calais ‘jungle’ and other refugee camps as part of a two-year tour of ‘Hamlet’ to every country in the world. He has taught theatre in the community and run workshops on theatre and censorship for ‘Index’ magazine. Matthew is a founding member of Earth Ensemble - a theatre group for climate activism born out of Extinction Rebellion.
John Farndon is an author, playwright, poet, songwriter, literary translator and activist. As a translator, he champions the literature of Russia and Central Asia and is chairman of the Eurasian Creative Guild. He was joint winner of the EBRD literary prize 2019 for his translation of Uzbek poetry in Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance and finalist in the 2020 US PEN Translation award for the Kazakh epic Dead Wander in the Desert by Rollan Seysenbaev, about the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea. He is also a founding member of Earth Ensemble, the theatre and music company associated with Extinction Rebellion, which has brought climate activist performances to the streets of London and the Edinburgh Festival.
Credits:
OYUB was created by Elena Gremina Anna Dobrovolskaia and Zarema Zaudinova
Translated by Alex Trustrum Thomas
Sound and original music by Josh Field
With thanks to Zarema Zaudinova Anna Dobrovolskaia Alina Anufrienko Scarlett Woolfe and Oliver Tobin
In memory of Elena Gremina Mikhail Ugarov and Sasha Rastorguev
Additional audio sources Chistyi chetverg, dir. by Sasha Rastorguev and Susanna Baranzhieva (Rossiia, 2003) ‘Nur-Zhovkhar. The ancient Chechen folklore’ by Petites Planetes/Vincent Moon, licenced under CC BY 3.0
(Image reproduced with permission, courtesy of Kazbek Chanturiya/OC Media)
This digital event explores how 3D-modelling technologies and virtual reality can open new understandings of the past. Prof Matthew Nicholls describes the creation of a large-scale 3D model of Ancient Rome, exploring the use of computer modelling in the study of ancient structures. Richard Smith brings the technological perspective, discussing the tools which enable the exploration of such a model in virtual reality. The talk will focus particularly on the Theatre of Pompey, a Roman theatre complex, completed in 55 BCE, which no longer survives.
Prof Matthew Nichols is Senior Tutor at St. John's College Oxford. He previously held a lectureship and then a chair in Classics at the University of Reading. There he developed a large scale 3D model of ancient Rome, which he has used extensively in teaching, research, outreach, and commercial work, winning several national awards for teaching and innovation.
Richard Smith is Technology Support Officer at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, where he provides technology support and 3D printing, advises on 3D modelling and AR/VR projects, and leads training courses on immersive technologies. He is also the co-founder of the Oxford X-Reality Hub, Oxford's central resource for virtual and augmented reality.
Dr Lia Costiner – Merton College, hosted this event as founder of the (en)coding Heritage TORCH Network.
In our very first episode, our host and network convenor Lillian Hingley (DPhil English, Oxford) reflects upon her thoughts in lockdown. Listen as she takes you through her various thoughts on the theorist Theodor Adorno, the aphorisms he wrote whilst at Oxford, and what he might have thought of her activity on Animal Crossing as a means of dealing with the uncertainty of the pandemic.
From the Silence Hub Network. Professor Alexandra Harris discusses Shakespeare's sonnet 23, communication in lockdown, body language and masks with Professor Kate McLoughlin.
From the Silence Hub. Professors Alexandra Harris and Kate McLoughlin discuss Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, how the lockdown makes us feel self-conscious and what it feels like to live in momentous historical times.
From the Silence Hub Network. Professors Alexandra Harris and Kate McLoughlin read D. H. Lawrence's poem 'Silence' and discuss the beauty and terror of silence, sex and death wishes.
From the Network. Silence HubProfessors Alexandra Harris and Kate McLoughlin read lines from The Task by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper and discuss the value of staying at home and not doing very much.
Book at Lunchtime: Imitating Authors Colin Burrow gives us an original literary history of imitation from an esteemed scholar and literary critic and a fascinating account of how authors from the earliest stages of Western literature to the present day have imitated each other. This book covers an impressive range of writers including Plato, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Burrow offers clear explanations of difficult concepts and complex histories and explains key concepts which enabled classical texts to have an influence on later writing and brings the discussion up to date by studying contemporary fictions about clones and imitation human beings and the future of imitation.
Full projection video as part of national Being Human Festival, a huge video projection onto the 3-storey Radcliffe humanities building, premiering SOURCE: CODE. As part of the national Being Human Festival, and Oxford's Christmas Light Festival, Humanities Light Night - Oxford Research Unwrapped! was a spectacular explosion of colour, sound and activity for all, including this huge video projection onto the 3-storey Radcliffe humanities building, premiering SOURCE: CODE which features the work of Oxford Humanities Professors Jacob Dahl, Richard Parkinson and Armand D'Angour, and co-created by Oxford Humanities researchers and The Projection Studio, world-class projection and sound-artists. A series of talks and activities also took place during the evening, relating to the overall theme of 'Discovery' which can be viewed separately.
Book at Lunchtime: Revolution Rekindled: The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography Polly Jones offers the first ever archival and oral history study of Brezhnev-era publishing and propaganda production, highlighting the consistent pressure throughout late socialism to find new forms of propaganda and inspiring 'revolutionary' narratives, and challenges the widespread idea that these became 'standardised' and 'stagnant' soon after Stalin's death. Jones reveals the vitality and popularity of late Soviet culture, especially biography and historical fiction. She emphasises that both writers and readers found in late Soviet 'official' publishing opportunities to reflect on complex questions of Russian and Soviet history and identity and employs extensive new archival material, and oral history interviews with some of the leading literary and cultural figures of the Brezhnev era. Panel includes: Dr Katherine Lebow, Professor Ann Jefferson and Professor Stephen Lovell
Book at Lunchtime: Empires of the Mind 'The empires of the future would be the empires of the mind' declared Churchill in 1943, envisaging universal empires living in peaceful harmony. Robert Gildea exposes instead the brutal realities of decolonisation and neo-colonialism which have shaped the postwar world. Even after the rush of French and British decolonisation in the 1960s, the strings of economic and military power too often remained in the hands of the former colonial powers. The more empire appears to have declined and fallen, the more a fantasy of empire has been conjured up as a model for projecting power onto the world stage and legitimised colonialist intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. This aggression, along with the imposition of colonial hierarchies in metropolitan society, has excluded, alienated and even radicalised immigrant populations. Meanwhile, nostalgia for empire has bedevilled relations with Europe and played a large part in explaining Brexit.
In this podcast the dynamic poet Patience Agbabi is in conversation about her Ted Hughes short-listed collection Telling Tales (2015), a rebellious reworking of Chaucer, and her contribution to the 2016 Refugee Tales project. After reading from both works Agbabi discusses with Professor Elleke Boehmer, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and medievalist Professor Marion Turner, the key themes that animate her work: her efforts to give voice to the marginalised, the influence of Chaucer upon her writing and practice, and her interests in grime music as well as poetic form, not least the sonnet. The recording was made on 5 December 2019 at a ‘Writers Make Worlds’ event in the English Faculty, University of Oxford.
Highlights of the Torch collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum for a special edition of After Hours as part of the Last Supper of Pompeii exhibition to celebrate all things Pompeii and ancient Rome. Mount Vesuvius is thought to have begun erupting on 24 October AD 79. Almost two thousand years later, TORCH collaborated with the Ashmolean Museum for a special edition of After Hours as part of the Last Supper of Pompeii exhibition to celebrate all things Pompeii and ancient Rome - with bite-sized talks from students and researchers, and activities for all to enjoy. Highlights from the evening can be viewed in this video.
This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, gives the first of the Princeton University Press Lectures. On January 31st, 1827, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe shocked his secretary by uttering a new word: world literature. Goethe had just read a Chinese novel and concluded that Europe needed to rethink its relation to the rest of the world. Humanity was entering a new phase: the phase of world literature.
Coined in provincial Weimar, the idea of world literature soon caught the imagination of Marx and Engels and was subsequently used by those seeking to promote national literatures, from Yiddish to South Asia, within an international context. What can we learn from this history? And what does the term world literature mean today?
The guest speaker for this event is Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His writings, which include a dozen books and anthologies and over sixty articles and essays, range from philosophy and theater to world literature and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe. His most recent book, The Written World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on radio and television, and is forthcoming in over a dozen languages. In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the arts and humanities in a changing world.
Highlights of the Humanities Night Light event. As part of the national Being Human Festival, and Oxford's Christmas Light Festival, Humanities Light Night - Oxford Research Unwrapped! was a spectacular explosion of colour, sound and activity for all, including a huge video projection onto the 3-storey Radcliffe humanities building, premiering SOURCE: CODE which featured the work of Oxford Humanities Professors Jacob Dahl, Richard Parkinson and Armand D'Angour, and co-created by Oxford Humanities researchers and The Projection Studio, world-class projection and sound-artists. A series of talks and activities also took place during the evening, relating to the overall theme of 'Discovery'.
This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Exploring the narrative of the show through a selection of highlighted objects Ashmolean After Hours: Carpe Diem! Mount Vesuvius is thought to have begun erupting on 24 October AD 79. Almost two thousand years later, TORCH collaborated with the Ashmolean Museum for a special edition of After Hours to 'seize the day' and celebrate all things Pompeii and ancient Rome, with bite-sized talks from students and researchers, and activities for all to enjoy. This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Oxford’s libraries house many beautiful books copied by hand before the arrival of print. What, though, about the many more books from the past which have not survived? Dr Daniel Sawyer, Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature, Merton College, Oxford Secrets from Missing Manuscripts - Oxford’s libraries house many beautiful books copied by hand before the arrival of print. What, though, about the many more books from the past which have not survived? How might we study lost manuscripts, and what might the process teach us about the experience of losing things more generally?
Humanities Light Night – Oxford Research Unwrapped!
As part of the national Being Human Festival, and Oxford’s Christmas Light Festival, Humanities Light Night - Oxford Research Unwrapped! was a spectacular explosion of colour, sound and activity for all, including a huge video projection onto the 3-storey Radcliffe humanities building, premiering SOURCE: CODE which featured the work of Oxford Humanities Professors Jacob Dahl, Richard Parkinson and Armand D'Angour, and co-created by Oxford Humanities researchers and The Projection Studio, world-class projection and sound-artists. A series of talks took place during the evening, relating to the theme ‘Discovery’.
This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
How does AI interact with creativity? Watch this fascinating panel discussion with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, composer Emily Howard and Sarah Ellis, the RSC's Director of Digital Development. Bringing together world leading researchers and industry professionals, this event explores how creatives are harnessing the power of new technologies to fashion new kinds of creative and artistic practice in theatre and music. How have they engaged in the AI revolution, and what implications does it have for creativity and the arts?
Panellists: Marcus du Sautoy (Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science), Emily Howard (Professor of Composition, Royal Northern College of Music) and Sarah Ellis (Head of Digital Development, Royal Shakespeare Company). Chair: Rana Mitter (Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China).
TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on India, Empire and First World War Culture by Professor Santanu Das. Held on 20th November 2019. Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 1914-1918 conflict and their socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.
Panel commentators will include Dr Yasmin Khan, Professor Laura Marcus, and Professor Jay Winter.
Joy Owen, Marcio Goldman, Ramon Sarro and Santanu Das give talks as part of the Southern Biographies event. Chaired, Thomas Cousins.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Chaucer: A European Life by Professor Marion Turner. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life-yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.
Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales.
By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales. Bart van Es is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, focusing primarily on Spenser and Shakespeare. Bart is interested in connections between history writing and poetry in early modern England. In recent years his research has focused primarily on Renaissance drama and the material realities of London’s theatre world. The Cut Out Girl, his work of creative non-fiction on World War II in the Netherlands, won the 2018 Costa Book of the Year award. Marion Turner is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Marion’s research interests lie in late medieval secular literature and history, and she has published very widely on Chaucer, including two books and many articles. Chaucer: A European Life, was her first foray into biography, and she now teaches life-writing as well as medieval literature. Her next book is going to be a global history – or biography – of the Wife of Bath across time. Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French at the University of Oxford. Having focused for several years on fifteenth-century literary defences of women, she now explores more broadly questions of narrative voice and identity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French literature. Her second book, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France examines voices and bodies speaking from beyond the grave and was runner-up for the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize in 2017. John Watts is Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Chair of the History Faculty Board. John is interested in politics, political culture and political structures in later medieval England and Europe, between the 13th and the early 16th centuries. Most of his published work deals with later medieval English politics and political culture, but he has also written about politics in later medieval Europe. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and was the Director of TORCH from 2015 to 17. She is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, and internationally known for her research in anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. She is also a novelist and short story writer, most recently of The Shouting in the Dark.
J.K. Rowling’s imagination is fired by the past. How do historical objects illuminate the real-world sources of her ideas? In this interview Dr Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, explores how Harry Potter works its magic on the stories and stuff of the past.
Dr Groves blogs at Bathilda's Notebook on Mugglenet, where you can find out more about the real history behind Hogwarts’ creation.
Book at Lunchtime seminar held on 16th October 2019. How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais 'Jungle' - the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived.
Lande: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire.
Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.
Authors Professor Dan Hicks and Dr Sarah Mallet were in conversation at this TORCH Book at Lunchtime event with Professor Mary Bosworth, Dr Leonie Ansems de Vries, Lisa Kennedy and John McTernan, introduced by Professor Wes Williams.
Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
A roundtable discussion consider future landscapes in the context of food, farming and conservation. People's Landscapes: Beyond the Green and Pleasant Land is a lecture series convened by the University of Oxford's National Trust Partnership, which brings together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people's engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future. The National Trust cares for 248,000 hectares of open space across England, Wales and Northern Ireland; landscapes which hold the voices and heritage of millions of people and track the dramatic social changes that occurred across our nations' past. In the year when Manchester remembers the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, the National Trust's 2019 People’s Landscapes programme is drawing out the stories of the places where people joined to challenge the social order and where they demonstrated the power of a group of people standing together in a shared place. Throughout this year the National Trust is asking people to look again, to see beyond the green and pleasant land, and to find the radical histories that lie, often hidden, beneath their feet. At the fourth and final event in the series, Future Landscapes, panellists consider future landscapes in the context of food, farming and conservation, with panellists considering what we may want vs. what we will need from our landscapes in a post-Brexit Britain and beyond.
Speakers: Alice Purkiss | National Trust Partnership Lead | University of Oxford (Welcome)
Helen Antrobus | National Public Programme Curator | National Trust (Introduction)
Dr Anita Weatherby | Research Programme Manager | National Trust (Chair)
Sue Cornwell | Head of Public Benefit and Nature | National Trust
Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland | Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science | University of Oxford
Phil Jarvis | Environment Forum Chair | National Farmers' Union
Dr Prue Addison | Conservation Strategy Director | Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxford Wildlife Trust
For more information about the People’s Landscapes Lecture Series and the National Trust Partnership at the University of Oxford please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/national-trust-partnership
Abigail Green (Faculty of History), Nino Strachey (National Trust), and Silvia Davoli, (Strawberry Hill House) give a presentation on their Knowledge Exchange research project on Jewish Country Houses Professor Abigail Green is Tutorial Fellow in History at Brasenose College. She works at the interface between modern European history and international Jewish history, and is the author of Fatherlands: State-building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001), which was shortlisted in the Historisches Buch awards, and of Moses Montefiore: Jewish Hero, Imperial Liberator (2010), which won the Sami Rohr Choice Award, and was nominated a TLS Book of the Year and a New Republic Best Book of 2010. She is working on a book tentatively entitled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights, to be published by Princeton University Press, and has just been awarded a 4 year AHRC Research Grant to lead a major collaborative project ‘Jewish Country Houses – Objects, Networks People’.
Nino Strachey, National Trust
Nino Strachey is Head of Research and Specialist Advice for the National Trust. Since starting her career with the Landmark Trust, she has worked for English Heritage and the National Trust, curating the homes of scientists (Darwin), politicians (Churchill) and writers (Shaw). Her research focuses on the expression of personality through place, interpreting the biography of buildings and collections. Her recent book 'Rooms of their own: Eddy Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West' looks at the homes of three writers linked to the Bloomsbury Group, and explores changing attitudes to sexuality and gender in the 1920s and 30s. She is a Trustee of the Strawberry Hill Collections Trust, a member of the Mercers Heritage and Arts Advisory Group, and has been a Guardian of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings
Silvia Davoli, Strawberry Hill House
Dr Silvia Davoli is the Research Curator at Strawberry Hill House and is a specialist in the history of collecting. Since 2013 she has been researching the whereabouts of the Horace Walpole Collection. She recently curated the exhibition Strawberry Hill Lost Treasures. Masterpieces from the Horace Walpole Collection (Oct. 2018- Feb.2019). In the past years she has conducted provenance research for a number of museums such as the Wallace Collection, National Gallery of London, Waddesdon Manor and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. She is one of the core members of the Jewish Country House Project. Her contribution in particular focus on Jewish Collectors and art dealers.
Book at Lunchtime: Delius and the Sound of Place Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862–1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.
Book at Lunchtime: Compassion's Edge, Winner of the 2018 Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize. Compassion's Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, and charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration with the Revocation of the Edict in 1685. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division: the seventeenth-century texts of fellow-feeling led not to communal concerns but to paralysis, misreading, and isolation. Early modern fellow-feeling drew distinctions, policed its borders, and far from reaching out to others, kept the other at arm's length. It became a central feature in the debates about the place of religious minorities after the Wars of Religion, and according to Katherine Ibbett, continues to shape the way we think about difference today. Compassion's Edge ranges widely over genres, contexts, and geographies. Ibbett reads epic poetry, novels, moral treatises, dramatic theory, and theological disputes. She takes up major figures such as D'Aubigné, Montaigne, Lafayette, Corneille, and Racine, as well as less familiar Jesuit theologians, Huguenot ministers, and nuns from a Montreal hospital. Although firmly rooted in early modern studies, she reflects on the ways in which the language of compassion figures in contemporary conversations about national and religious communities. Investigating the affective undertow of religious toleration, Compassion's Edge provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
About the panel Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Caroline de Jager Fellow and Tutor in French at Trinity College. Katherine’s research focuses on early modern literature, culture and political thought. Previous publications have included a book on tragedy (especially Pierre Corneille) and theories of political action; and a coedited volume thinking through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Trauerspiel and its relevance to a French corpus. Katherine is currently working on a book on the writing of water in early modern France and its territories, from the lyric poets of the sixteenth century to the Mississippi settlements of the 1700s. Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Merton College. Her research centres on the literature of the early modern period in England and the complex interrelations of literary form and other forms of cultural practice. Lorna’s books include The Usurer’s Daughter (1994); Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (2000); The Invention of Suspicion (2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015). Recently, she edited The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature (2017), which won the Roland Bainton Award for the best early modern reference book. Lorna is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford. Teresa Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Oriel College. Teresa’s research brings perspectives from early modern English and American political thought to bear on questions in contemporary political theory and practice. Her book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, examines contemporary calls for civility in light of seventeenth-century debates about religious toleration. Teresa is currently working on her second book, Acknowledging Equality. Emma Claussen is Career Development Fellow at New College. Emma works on literature and thought in the early modern period, with a particular interest in politics and moral philosophy. She is currently writing a book on sixteenth-century uses of the word politique and attendant conceptions of politics, political behaviour, and correct political action. Her next project will explore the intersection between moral and biological conceptions of life c. 1550-1650.
Book at Lunchtime: Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790–2015 In this first full-length study of the war veteran in literature, Kate McLoughlin draws new critical attention to a figure central to national life. Offering fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical works, she shows how authors from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling have deployed veterans to explore questions that are simultaneously personal, political, and philosophical: What does a community owe to those who serve it? What can be recovered from the past? Do people stay the same over time? Are there right times of life at which to do certain things? Is there value in experience? How can wisdom be shared? Veteran Poetics features veterans who travel in time, cause havoc with their reappearances, solve murders, refuse to stop talking about the wars they have been in, and refuse to say a word about them. Through this last trait, they also prompt consideration of possible critical responses to silence.
A panel discussion with Karin Amatmoekrim, Margaretta Jolly, and JC Niala, exploring the politics and poetics of writing an activist life. Karin is an award-winning novelist, and TORCH Global South Visiting Fellow. She will speak about her biography of Anil Ramdas. Margaretta is Professor of Cultural Studies and directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at Sussex. She will speak about her project Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-present'. JC is an award-winning screen and stage writer, cultural producer and an activist. Her work has been featured on BBC2, BBC Radio 4, CBS in the US, ABC in Australia among other media outlets.
This event celebrates the publication of Professor Derek Attridge's work The Experience of Poetry with a book launch panel discussion. The Experience of Poetry asks, was the experience of poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms play a part in the lives of hearers and readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, Europe during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and Britain during the Renaissance? This event is part of the 'Writers Make Worlds' series, Professor Attridge will offer a response to the panellists. About the book: In tackling these questions, this book first examines the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. It moves on to deal with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the place of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. A final part investigates the experience of poetry in the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII's court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan era. Among the topics considered in this part are the importance of the printed page, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the performance of poetry in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. In tracking both continuity and change across these many centuries, the book throws fresh light on the role and importance of poetry in western culture.
This lecture by Sara Ahmed draws on interviews conducted with staff and students who have made complaints within universities that relate to unfair, unjust or unequal working conditions and to abuses of power such as sexual and racial harassment. It approaches complaint as a form of diversity work: the work some have to do in order to be accommodated. Making a complaint requires becoming an institutional mechanic: you have to work out how to get a complaint through a system. It is because of the difficulty of getting through that complaints often end up being about the system. The lecture explores the significance of how complaints happen 'behind closed doors,' and shows how doors are often closed even when they appear to be opened.
Book at Lunchtime: Art and Political Thought in Medieval England c.1150-1350 Images and imagery played a major role in medieval political thought and culture, but their influence has rarely been explored. This book provides a full assessment of the subject. Starting with an examination of the writings of late twelfth-century courtier-clerics, and their new vision of English political life as a heightened religious drama, it argues that visual images were key to the development and expression of medieval English political ideas and arguments. It discusses the vivid pictorial metaphors used in contemporary political treatises, and highlights their interaction with public decorative schemas in English great churches, private devotional imagery, seal iconography, illustrations of English history and a range of other visual sources. Meanwhile, through an exploration of events such as the Thomas Becket conflict, the making of Magna Carta, the Barons' War and the deposition of Edward II, it provides new perspectives on the political role of art, especially in reshaping basic assumptions and expectations about government and political society in medieval England.
A roundtable discussion exploring the ways in which writers, artists and musicians have both responded to and created conceptions of 'place' throughout history. Thursday 16th May 2019. People's Landscapes: Beyond the Green and Pleasant Land is a lecture series convened by the University of Oxford's National Trust Partnership, which brings together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people’s engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future.
The National Trust cares for 248,000 hectares of open space across England, Wales and Northern Ireland; landscapes which hold the voices and heritage of millions of people and track the dramatic social changes that occurred across our nations' past. In the year when Manchester remembers the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, the National Trust's 2019 People’s Landscapes programme is drawing out the stories of the places where people joined to challenge the social order and where they demonstrated the power of a group of people standing together in a shared place. Throughout this year the National Trust is asking people to look again, to see beyond the green and pleasant land, and to find the radical histories that lie, often hidden, beneath their feet.
At the second event in the series, Creative Landscapes, panellists explore the ways in which writers, artists and musicians have both responded to and created conceptions of 'place' throughout history, considering the role of taste, nostalgia and imaginary spaces in our understanding of landscape today.
Speakers:
Alice Purkiss, National Trust Partnership Lead, University of Oxford (Welcome)
Helen Antrobus, Contemporary Arts Programme Manager, National Trust (Introduction)
Grace Davies, National Public Programme Curator, National Trust (Chair)
Kate Stoddart, Independent Curator, Project Manager and Mentor
Dr Rosemary Shirley, Senior Lecturer Art Theory and Practice, Manchester Metropolitan University
Craig Oldham, Designer and Creative Consultant
Professor Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
For more information about the People’s Landscapes Lecture Series and the National Trust Partnership at the University of Oxford please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/national-trust-partnership
A roundtable discussion of the history of land access and ownership, exploring how this has both physically and politically shaped our land and our access to it. People's Landscapes: Beyond the Green and Pleasant Land is a lecture series convened by the University of Oxford’s National Trust Partnership, which brings together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people’s engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future.
The National Trust cares for 248,000 hectares of open space across England, Wales and Northern Ireland; landscapes which hold the voices and heritage of millions of people and track the dramatic social changes that occurred across our nations' past. In the year when Manchester remembers the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, the National Trust’s 2019 People’s Landscapes programme is drawing out the stories of the places where people joined to challenge the social order and where they demonstrated the power of a group of people standing together in a shared place. Throughout this year the National Trust is asking people to look again, to see beyond the green and pleasant land, and to find the radical histories that lie, often hidden, beneath their feet.
At the first event in the series, Contested Landscapes, panelists discuss the history of land access and ownership, exploring how this has both physically and politically shaped our land and our access to it.
The Speakers: Alice Purkiss National Trust Partnership Lead University of Oxford (Welcome)
Helen Antrobus National Public Programme Curator National Trust (Chair)
Dr Briony McDonagh Lecturer in Human Geography University of Hull
Helen Wright Visitor Experience Manager - Peak District National Trust
Dr Stephen Mileson Research Fellow University of Oxford
Kate Ashbrook Chair of Trustees Ramblers
For more information about the People’s Landscapes Lecture Series and the National Trust Partnership at the University of Oxford please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/national-trust-partnership
This talk from TORCH Global South Visiting Professor Supriya Chaudhuri will be illustrated with images from the Parichay archives and related documents and correspondence. Literary communities - often intersecting with the more exclusive segregations of coterie or group – are constitutive of the social life of modernism. In India as elsewhere, modernist communities were formed around a shared writing platform, that of the ‘little magazine’, and a shared social expression, that of conversation.
One such community in 1930s Calcutta grew up around the literary journal Parichay. Its members met regularly at the homes of the journal’s editors for sessions of animated discussion that are known in Bengali as adda. The group included not only poets and artists, but also scientists, historians, sociologists, disaffected British colonialists, nationalist politicians, and spies.
The 1930s was a period of literary radicalism, of shifting party allegiances and political fault-lines, linked to the fortunes of the Comintern, the rise of National Socialism and fascism in Europe, and the last phase of the struggle for modern nationhood in India. At the same time, the cosmopolitanism of the Parichay circle, responding to the major currents of international modernism and to the idea of a ‘world literature,’ was co-extensive with its commitment to its own ‘provincial’ literary culture.
The themes raised by Matthew Reynolds' Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation will be discussed by Dr Jason Gaiger (Ruskin School), Dr Adriana Jacobs (Oriental Studies) and Dr Nick Halmi (English). Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man's unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds's The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more. Matthew Reynolds teaches at Oxford where he is a Fellow of St Anne's College and The Times lecturer in the English Faculty. It has been said of him that 'the best critics, like the best poets (in Browning's words) impart the gift of seeing to the rest: Reynolds has this gift of seeing and imparting' (TLS). His earlier books are The Poetry of Translation, The Realms of Verse 1830-1870, the novels The World Was All Before Them and Designs for a Happy Home(/i), and editions of Dante in English and of Manzoni.
The closing remarks by Helen Antrobus, National Public Programme Curator, National Trust at the Women and Power conference which took place on the 6th and 7th March 2019. Women and Power: Redressing the Balance was a 2-day conference, jointly convened by the National Trust and the University of Oxford, which took place on the 6th and 7th March 2019 at St Hugh’s College in Oxford. The conference brought together professionals from across the academic and heritage sectors to reflect on programming around the 2018 centenary of the Representation of the People Act which granted some women the right to vote and to look to the future of researching and programming women’s histories.
The conference featured papers from a range of heritage, cultural and academic institutions who marked the centenary anniversary. Many of the programmes, exhibitions and events that responded to the centenary not only explored the stories of 100 years ago but openly questioned the representation of women’s lives in the histories inherited by curators and researchers, and experienced in public life, today.
This film captures the closing remarks by Helen Antrobus, National Public Programme Curator, National Trust at the Women and Power conference which took place on the 6th and 7th March 2019.
Speakers:
Helen Antrobus, National Public Programme Curator, National Trust
For more information about the Women and Power conference and the National Trust Partnership at the University of Oxford please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/national-trust-partnership
A discussion about the book Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Part of 'A Book at Lunchtime' series This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.
Launch event for Futures Thinking, a new research group looking into future problems and opportunities created by advances in technology and artificial intelligence. In literature, in popular media, in scientific research, and in public consciousness, discourse about the future, machine learning, and the human elements of digital technologies proliferates more now than ever before. Thanks to developments in artificial intelligence (AI), we are able to speculate about how our fundamentally social species might interact with performatively human-like machines of our own making. Television shows like Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale, and novels like The Circle or Never Let Me Go speculate about dystopian futures that reflect political realities not unlike those that are currently unfolding in the Global North.
Ethics in AI are much debated in science fiction. However, the scholars in the fields of AI and those in literature, history, and gender studies seldom interact to discuss the realities and probabilities of the future of a technologically advanced mankind. Crucially important to our network is the recognition of how narrative informs and shapes the future. Bringing scholars of historical and literary narratives into conversation with ethicists and developers of digital AI technologies is of paramount importance to futures thinking.
Discussion on AI and global governance is thriving at Oxford, while speculative fiction is an important emerging field in literary studies. This network brings these fields into conversation. We extend from exploring speculative fiction research, questions about the robustness of machine learning, the future trade-offs between privacy and security, to thinking about how we might use historical feminist consciousness-raising methods to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration.
We are keen for interested parties to join our group so if you work on or are interested in any aspect of futures thinking, be it in science or the humanities, in any of the University’s divisions, please contact us and come along to our events!
We are a network founded on principles of access and inclusion, and strive to host events that consider the lifestyle ethics and carer-responsibilities of our members and attendees, as well as their access needs, pronouns, and other inclusion needs. Please do contact us for further information on our manifesto. Chelsea Haith, Futures Thinking Founder, DPhil in Contemporary Literature
Prof Robert Iliffe, Professor of History of Science
Dr Gretta Corporaal, Sociologist of Work and Organisations in the OII
Dr Alexandra Paddock, Editorial Lead on LitHits, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of English
Prof Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, LitHits Founder, Professor of English and Theatre Studies
Alice Billington, Futures Thinking Co-Convenor, DPhil in Modern History
Sandra Mayer, author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna, argues it was his willingness to both please and tease his audience. His plays skilfully manoeuvre between conformism and subversion, conventionality and innovation. Her new book investigates the dynamic interplay of literary work, theatre and audience, and is centrally concerned with the question of ‘what makes a classic?’
What has led to a century of almost uninterrupted performance on the Viennese stage of the works of Victorian Britain’s most controversial playwright?
It also asks, what are the factors that transform a theatrical novelty into a time-honoured repertory highlight that may be reworked from different aesthetic and ideological perspectives? What makes (or breaks) a work’s canonical endurance? What does the translation and staging of a play tell us about Austrian culture?
In this first book-length study in English of the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in the German-speaking world, Oscar Wilde in Vienna charts the plays’ history on Viennese stages between 1903 and 2013. It casts a spotlight on the international reputation of one of the most popular English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural history in the long twentieth century.
Drawing on extensive archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's plays against the background of political crises and social transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonisation within an environment positioned - like Wilde himself - at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity.
Dr Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian whose research interests include literary celebrity and authorship, cultural transfer and reception, literary networks and cosmopolitanism, and the literature and culture of the Victorian Age. Having received her doctorate from the University of Vienna, Sandra has since worked as a researcher and lecturer in Oxford, Vienna and Zurich. Her previous work has focused on Benjamin Disraeli as a celebrity and she has co-edited books on Irish drama. She is currently Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, working on the Art and Action: Literary Celebrity and Politics project. A joint event hosted by the Theatre Studies and Queer Studies Networks. Sandra will be joined by an expert panel to discuss the book and its themes: Professor Mary Luckhurst (Head of the School of Arts, University of Bristol), Professor Dominic Janes (Professor of Modern History, Keele University), Chaired by Dr Stefano Evangelista (Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford)
Ethel Maqeda gives a talk for the workshop, What is a Decolonial Curriculum? Held at TORCH on 28th November 2018. Decolonising the curriculum must mean more than simply including diverse texts. As Dalia Gebrial, one of the editors of the new book, Decolonising the University (Pluto Press, 2018) has written, any student and academic-led decolonisation movement must not only 'rigorously understand and define its terms, but locate the university as just one node in a network of spaces where this kind of struggle must be engaged with. To do this...is to enter the university space as a transformative force
Kwame Dawes, TORCH Visiting Professor, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the workshop, What is a Decolonial Curriculum? Held at TORCH on 28th November 2018. Decolonising the curriculum must mean more than simply including diverse texts. As Dalia Gebrial, one of the editors of the new book, Decolonising the University (Pluto Press, 2018) has written, any student and academic-led decolonisation movement must not only 'rigorously understand and define its terms, but locate the university as just one node in a network of spaces where this kind of struggle must be engaged with. To do this...is to enter the university space as a transformative force
A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Elleke Boehmer, author of Postcolonial Poetics, joined by Dr Malachi McIntosh, Professor Ben Morgan, Professor Richard Drayton and Professor Robert Young (chair). Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
About the author
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, UK, and a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including monographs and novels. Her monographs include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Stories of Women (2005), and Indian Arrivals (winner of the ESSE 2015-16 Prize). Her novels include The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Screens Against the Sky (1990).
About the panel
Dr Malachi McIntosh (Runnymede Trust)
Professor Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford)
Professor Richard Drayton (King's College London)
Professor Robert Young (NYU)
An insight into prize-winning Dutch Surinamese columnist, correspondent, essayist, journalist, and TV and radio host, Anil Ramdas.
Henrik Ibsen's drama is the most prominent and lasting contribution of the cultural surge seen in Scandinavian literature in the later nineteenth century. When he made his debut in Norway in 1850, the nation's literary presence was negligible, yet by 1890 Ibsen had become one of Europe's most famous authors. Contrary to the standard narrative of his move from restrictive provincial origins to liberating European exile, Narve Fulsas and Tore Rem show how Ibsen's trajectory was preconditioned on his continued embeddedness in Scandinavian society and culture, and that he experienced great success in his home markets. This volume traces how Ibsen's works first travelled outside Scandinavia and studies the mechanisms of his appropriation in Germany, Britain and France. Engaging with theories of book dissemination and world literature, and re-assessing the emergence of 'peripheral' literary nations, this book provides new perspectives on the work of this major figure of European literature and theatre. Narve and Tore will be joined an expert panel to discuss the book and its themes, Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine's, Oxford), Professor Julia Mannherz (Oriel, Oxford) Chaired by Professor Peter McDonald (St Hugh's, Oxford).
The keynote talk for 'Collaboration in Theatre symposium' at the University of Oxford, 19 October 2018. Most of the directors presented in David Bradby and David Williams's seminal 1988 volume Directors' Theatre are also renowned as leaders of ensembles. This position has often been problematised in terms of authorship and the implied hierarchies. Simon Shepherd (2012) has noted that director figureheads in ensembles became increasingly unfashionable in the aftermath of poststructuralist anti-authoritarianism. At the turn of the 21st century ensemble directors have sought to emphasise the element of co-authorship in their work or a relativisation of their own authority. Mermikides and Smart (2010) have identified a contemporary prevalence of ensembles led by tandems. My own previous research has encountered reluctant ensemble leaders, directorless ensembles and leaders interested in facilitating self-determination of their groups (Radosavljevic 2013). Using notions of heterarchy and eco-leadership, this paper took the investigation forward in an attempt of defining a 21st century model of ensemble director. More specifically, the paper looked at the case study of Improbable Theatre's directorial tandem Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson and their use of improvisation as a type of self-sustaining systemic leadership. The case study expands the theme of improvisation established in the original volume, and represents an addition to a revised anniversary edition of the book, edited by Peter Boenisch and David Williams (due in 2018). Dr Duska Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is the author of the award-winning Theatre-Making - Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (2013) and editor of The Contemporary Ensemble (2013) and Theatre Criticism - Changing Landscapes (2016). The talk was introduced by Hannah Greenstreet (Jesus College) and Alexander Thomas (University College)
A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Natalia Nowakowska, Somerville College, University of Oxford, Professor Julia Mannherz (Oriel, Oxford) Professor Hannah Skoda (St John’s, Oxford) Chaired by Professor Katherine Lebow (Christ Church, Oxford). Alongside the Renaissance dynasties of the Tudors, Valois, Habsburgs, and Medici once stood the Jagiellonians. Largely forgotten in Britain, their memory remains a powerful element within modern Europe.
Remembering the Jagiellonians is the first study of international memories of the Jagiellonians (1386–1596), one of the most powerful but lesser known royal dynasties of Renaissance Europe. It explores how the Jagiellon family has been remembered across Central, Eastern and Northern Europe since the early modern period. The book considers their ongoing role in modern-day culture and politics and their impact on the development of competing modern national identities
Offering a wide-ranging panoramic analysis of Jagiellonian memory over five hundred years, this book includes coverage of numerous present-day European countries, ranging from Bavaria to Kiev, and from Stockholm to the Adriatic. It explores how one family are still remembered in over a dozen neighbouring countries. Contributors use memory theory, social science and medieval and early modern European history to engage in an international and interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between memory and dynasty through time.
Edited by Natalia Nowakowska, Fellow and Associate Professor in History at Somerville College, University of Oxford, and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project 'Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Memory and Identity in Central Europe'. Her previous publications include King Sigismund and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalization (2018) and Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) (2007).
Contributors: Natalia Nowakowska, Giedre Mickunaite, Stanislava Kuzmova, Ilya Afanasyev, Dusan Zupka, Susanna Niiranen, Simon M. Lewis, Tetiana Hoshko, Olga Kozubska-Andrusiv
A One-Day International Conference held at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, on June 25, 2018. This conference showcased interdisciplinary research on poverty in the fields of postcolonial, comparative, and world literature.
A One-Day International Conference held at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, on June 25, 2018. This conference showcased interdisciplinary research on poverty in the fields of postcolonial, comparative, and world literature.
Cultural Citizenship in India argues that citizenship is an ongoing and evolving discursive project. Further, it studies the role of culture and different media in the process of citizen-making by taking postcolonial India as its case study. Book at lunchtime discussion. Cultural Citizenship If the nation is an imagined community constructed through discourse, then the feeling of being part of that nation - can only arise when citizens are empowered to enter the discourse and modify it. Linking political science and cultural studies to explore the mutually constitutive role of discourse and institutions, Cultural Citizenship in India argues that citizenship is an ongoing and evolving discursive project. Further, it studies the role of culture and different media in the process of citizen-making by taking postcolonial India as its case study.
Reni Eddo-Lodge (author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and winner of the Jhalak Prize 2018), in conversation with Dr Rebecca Surender (Pro Vice-Chancellor and Advocate for Diversity, University of Oxford).
An exploration of a Victorian blue-print for a city of health and happiness, where everyone could live to 100.
Book at Lunchtime, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity is a study of the union of matter and the soul in the human being in the thought of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. At first glance this issue might appear arcane, but it was at the centre of polemic with heresy in the thirteenth century and at the centre of the development of medieval thought more broadly. The book argues that theological issues, especially the need for an identical body to be resurrected at the end of time, but also considerations about Christ's crucifixion and saints' relics, were central to Aquinas's account of how human beings are constituted. The book explores in particular how theological questions and concerns shaped Aquinas's thought on individuality and personal and bodily identity over time, his embryology and understanding of heredity, his work on nutrition and bodily growth, and his fundamental conception of matter itself. It demonstrates, up-close, how Aquinas used his peripatetic sources, Aristotle and (especially) Averroes, to frame and further his own thinking in these areas. The book also indicates how Aquinas's thought on bodily identity became pivotal to university debates and relations between the rival mendicant orders in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and that quarrels surrounding these issues persisted into the fifteenth century.
Find out how Anne Griffiths’ work, Lost in Imagination, reimagines intriguing objects lost within the Pitt Rivers archive.
Jane Stevenson (University of Oxford) gives a talk for the JCH conference's fifth panel; Building New.
Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy (Université gives a talk for the JCH conference's fifth session; Building New.
Olga Medvedkova (CNRS) gives a talk for the JCH conference's fourth session; The Anglo-French Connection.
Tom Stammers (University of Durham) gives a talk for the JCH conference's fourth session; The Anglo-French Connection.
Silvia Davoli (Strawberry Hill House) and Nino Strachey (National Trust) gives a talk for the JCH conference's fourth session; The Anglo-French Connection.
Martin Sabrow (ZZF Potsdam/ Humboldt University) gives a talk for the JCH conference's third session; The Political World of the Jewish Country House.
Todd Endelman (University of Michigan) gives a talk for the JCH conference's third session; The Political World of the Jewish Country House.
Mimi Schmidt (Jindal Global University) gives a talk for the JCH conference's second session; Villas and Chateaux.
Alice Legé (University of Amiens/University of Milan) gives a talk for the JCH conference's second session; Villas and Chateaux.
Lisa Silverman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) gives a talk for the JCH conference's first conference The Lure of the Land.
Paolo Pellegrini (Scuola di Archivistica, Paelografica e Diplomatica dell'Archivio di Stato di Perugia) gives a talk for the JCH conference's first session; The Lure of the Land.
Laura Leibmann (Reed College) gives a talk for the JCH conference's first panel, The Lure of the Land.
Abigail Green (Oxford) introduces the conference, held in the Radcliffe Humanities Building on 5th March 2018.
Book at Lunchtime, Art and Emergency During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.
Book at Lunchtime, In search of the Phoenicians The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
Author, Clare Harris, talks about her book on photography in Tibet - a place that has for centuries been a source of fascination for outsiders and a captivating yet troublesome subject for photographers. Mysterious and magnificent, Tibet has for centuries been a source of fascination for outsiders and a captivating yet troublesome subject for photographers. The country is both geographically and politically challenging, and access has never been easy. Even today, photography of Tibet often remains embroiled in debates about the country’s past, present and future. This book is the first historical survey of photography in Tibet and the Himalayas, and it offers remarkable new insights into the attempts of both foreign and Tibetan photographers to document the region.
Leading Tibetologist Professor Clare Harris (Pitt Rivers Museum) combines the results of extensive research in museums and archives with her own fieldwork in Tibetan communities to present material that has never been made public or discussed before. This includes the earliest known photographs taken in Tibet, dating to 1863, the experimental camerawork of senior Tibetan monks – including the 13th Dalai Lama – and the creations of contemporary Tibetan photographers and artists. With every image she examines the complex religious, political and cultural climate in which it was produced.
100 years since the Representation of the People Act, the act which gave women the vote.
An expert panel discusses the phenomenon of ethnicisation of religious identifications focussing especially on the nexus of religious, ethnic and national identifications in colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial settings from Ireland to South Asia. The commonly invoked phrase 'Islam is not a race' forms a ubiquitous racist trope that represents Islamophobia as a legitimate political critique of religious ideology, rather than a form of ethnic and religious prejudice. Yet in spite of such rhetorical acrobatics, it is clear that we are observing an ‘ethnicisation’ of Islam in 'the West' – the hegemonic transformation of hugely diverse 'Muslim' populations into an allegedly singular community, defined in essentialising racist terms. Hidden behind the language of a binary between 'Muslim' and 'British'/'European'/'Western' 'culture' and 'values' – viewing these as fixed communal essences, rather than endlessly variable phenomena reproduced in the material practices of everyday life – this ethnoreligious essentialism-come-racism has gained ever-increasing acceptance in mainstream political discourse. Islam forms a particularly salient example today, but the ethnicisation of religious identifications is a phenomenon with a much broader transtemporal and global history. So at this round table on 'Ethnicised Religion and Sacralised Ethnicity in the Past and the Present', we will discuss this phenomenon, focusing especially on the nexus of religious, ethnic and national identifications in colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial settings from Ireland to South Asia.
Valuing Women With Disabilities: Infantilised, Medicalised, Pauperised? Disability is too often framed as separate and foreign to what matters for women (Frances Ryan). The relative absence of disability in the politics of the feminist movement, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson suggests, means ‘that feminist assumptions can fail to take into account disabled women’s situations’ because ‘some of the differences that disability provokes can complicate feminism’s understanding of female bodies and the oppression of them’. This leads Susan Wendell to posit that: 'we need a feminist theory of disability. Both because 16 per cent of women are disabled, and because this oppression of disabled people is so closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body'. The seminar asks has the feminist movement and its scholarship too often forgotten disabled women? How do we ensure scholarship, across the humanities and social sciences, takes an intersectional approach to understanding multiple identities and experiences of women with disabilities from Black and Minority Ethnic communities? In this seminar Dr Helen Brookman celebrates the work of Anna Gurney, a pioneering nineteenth-century scholar of Anglo-Saxon, who became a wheelchair user following an illness in childhood. Dr Brookman examines the impact Gurney's disability had on her scholarly praxis and considers the implications for writing the feminist history of scholarship. Julie Jaye Charles FRSA SARSM is Chief Executive and founder of Equalities National Council of Disabled People and Carers from Black and Minority Ethnic communities. For 30 years, Julie has been deeply involved in developing Black (BME) community driven strategies directly on improving the well-being, representation and social inclusion of those communities. She will discuss her vision of working with government to recognise and abolish the multiple inequalities and social exclusion which form the many barriers that undermine the value of BME disabled people and carers, across the spectrum of Health, Social Well-being and Care, Housing, Employment, Volunteering, Education, and Crime.
Book at Lunchtime, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film reappraises the lines of influence said to exist between Joyce's writing and early cinema and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of Joyce and film. Through a compelling combination of historical research and critical analysis, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley demonstrates that Joyce, early film-makers, and phenomenologists (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular) share a common enterprise: all are concerned with showing, rather than explaining, the 'inherence of the self in the world'. Instead of portraying an objective, neutral world, bereft of human input, Joyce, the film-makers, and the phenomenologists present embodied, conscious engagement with the environment and others: they are interested in the world-as-it-is-lived and transcend the seemingly-rigid binaries of seer/seen, subject/object, absorptive/theatrical, and personal/impersonal. This book re-evaluates the history of body- and spectator-focused film theories, placing Merleau-Ponty at the centre of the discussion, and considers the ways in which Joyce may have encountered such theories. In a wealth of close analyses, Joyce's fiction is read alongside the work of early film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès, and Mitchell and Kenyon, and in relation to the philosophical dimensions of early-cinematic devices such as the Mutoscope, the stereoscope, and the panorama. By putting Joyce's literary work—Ulysses above all—into dialogue with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.
James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.
With comics artist Una The TORCH Comics and Graphic Novels: The Politics of Form network are hosting a seminar on 'Becoming/Unbecoming' with comics artist Una, author of Becoming/Unbecoming part graphic memoir and part graphic history, discusses the ways in which comics can offer a powerful denunciation of violence against women and negotiate other kinds of traumatic pasts.
Book at Lunchtime, Unlocking the Church In Unlocking the Church, William Whyte explores a forgotten revolution in social and architectural history and in the history of the Church. He details the architectural and theological debates of the day, explaining how the Tractarians of Oxford and the Ecclesiologists of Cambridge were embroiled in the aesthetics of architecture, and how the Victorians profoundly changed the ways in which buildings were understood and experienced. No longer mere receptacles for worship, churches became active agents in their own rights, capable of conveying theological ideas and designed to shape people's emotions. These church buildings are now a challenge: their maintenance, repair or repurposing are pressing problems for parishes in age of declining attendance and dwindling funds. By understanding their past, unlocking the secrets of their space, there might be answers in how to deal with the legacy of the Victorians now and into the future. William Whyte (History, University of Oxford) joins an expert panel to discuss the book and its themes: Dan Hicks (Archeology, University of Oxford) Julia Smith (History, University of Oxford) Chairing the event was Mark Chapman (Theology, University of Oxford)
Book at Lunchtime, Late Victorian into Modern Late Victorian into Modern opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasises the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next. The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organising principle of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations between text and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality. Late Victorian into Modern was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for an edition, anthology or essay collection. Co-editors Laura Marcus (English, University of Oxford) and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (English, University of Oxford) were joined by an expert panel: Michael Bentley (History, University of St Andrews) Charlotte Jones (English, University of Oxford) Chairing: Philip Bullock (Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford)
The second seminar in the Disability and Curriculum Diversity series at TORCH The second seminar in the Disability and Curriculum Diversity series at TORCH with Elizabeth Frood (Associate Professor of Egyptology, Oxford), Dom Hyams (Producer and Editor-in-Chief, Power100) and Marie Tidball (Research Associate in Law, Oxford) . Professor Elizabeth Frood speaks on the way her own acquired disability has had an impact on re-framing how she does fieldwork and how this has led her to adapt the methodologies she uses as an Egyptologist. Entrepreneur, Television Presenter and Editor of Power 100, Dom Hyams speaks on the potential role of the AssistMi app and other assistive technology you work with, could have on revolutionising research, which not only makes fieldwork more accessible for disabled people but enables them as researchers to access important data which benefits academia more generally. This event was chaired by Dr Marie Tidball.
Stress & overwork in both education and professional life in the Victorian era and the 'dynamic' nature of disability and the impact of the stresses of modern life has. Professor Sally Shuttleworth (Faculty of English Language and Literature) will look at discussions of stress and overwork in both education and professional life in the Victorian era, based on her research. Although we are clearly living in a radically altered world, there are nonetheless startling similarities in the ways the problems of overwork have been framed and debated, then and now.
Dr Marie Tidball (Faculty of Law, Centre for Criminology and TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow) will talk about the 'dynamic' nature of disability and the impact that stresses of modern life have on its trajectories, employment and what people sometimes refer to as 'disability time'. That is, the changed experience of time due to pain, anxiety and stress caused by an impairment or the impact an impairment has on the length of time it takes to do 'activities of daily living' which in turn affects the availability of time as a resource which has value, such as getting dressed takes longer for prosthetic limb wearer, the increased extent of email, and related issues for people's energy levels and productivity. This has an interesting impact on the number of hours disabled people may have available or may be able to work and thus a factor affecting the disability pay gap.
Me and My Beliefs: Challenges of Identity and Society held on 28 November 2017 Bishop Libby Lane is Britain’s first woman bishop in the Church of England. In this talk - Me and My Beliefs: Challenges of Identity and Society - Bishop Libby explores the pathway that brought her to this position and addresses an area of identity not always covered in diversity debates. A panel of prominent speakers joins her in discussing what it means to be a person of faith in Britain today and impacts on diversity. On the panel: Jas' Elsner (Professor of Late Antique Art, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford and project lead on Empires of Faith). Shaista Aziz (freelance journalist and writer. Founder of The Everyday Bigotry Project). This event was chaired by Elleke Boehmer (Professor in World Literatures in English, University of Oxford)
Book at Lunchtime held on 8th November 2017. Exploring Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, this major exhibition will be the first to look at the art of the five world religions as they spread across continents in the first millennium AD.
On display will be remarkable objects created when the iconography of each religion was still being developed. Art and imagery were central to the spread of these systems of belief, and the visual identity of each religion was formed by encounters and interactions between different faiths and other traditions.
Accompanying the exhibition will be the 'Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions' catalogue. Editor Georgi Parpulov and contributor Stefanie Lenk are joined by an expert panel to discuss the catalogue and the exhibition at Book at Lunchtime. They will be joined by:
Gervase Rosser (History, University of Oxford)
Kate Cooper (History, Royal Holloway, University of London)
This event will be chaired by Mallica Kumbera Landrus (Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum)
Keynote lecture by Hilary Chute as part of the Documenting Trauma conference. The TORCH Comics and Graphic Novels network hosted a symposium on ‘Documenting Trauma: Comics and the Politics of Memory’. This symposium concluded with a keynote lecture by Hilary Chute on 'Disaster Drawn: Comics and Picturing Violence'.
Professor Simon Glendinnning (London School of Economics) delivered the keynote address on 'Thinking the Beyond of Crisis' at the TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse event 'Rethinking Crisis'.
With Luciano Floridi (University of Oxford). The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on 'Fascism, Fake News, and the Nature of Social Extremophilia' with Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford). Fascism is like an animal that lives at the edge of social environments. The harsher the conditions the more it becomes the only organism fit to survive. The difference, in this analogy, is that Fascism is like an extremophile that is also able to generate the toxic conditions under which it can live, thus becoming the fittest in such an environment. In the infosphere, this means polluting the environment with lies, propaganda, doubts, imprecisions, exaggerations, half-truths, improper contents, and any semantic pollution that can be generated. So the point to clarify is that Fascism is not supported by fakes news – e.g. it is not supposed to convince voters of alternative truths – but flourishes thanks to the damage that fake news cause. And the question to be addressed is therefore: given that any increase in the debate is an increase in the toxic conditions favourable to social extremophilia, how can a healthy environment be restored and maintained so that society can prevent Fascism and other forms of extremism from becoming the dominating species? These are the two points I shall discuss in the presentation.
In this TORCH Talk, Professor Eric Clarke talks about 'Music, Empathy and Cultural Understanding' at the Ashmolean Museum's Supersonic LiveFriday.
A project about talking to Italian communities in Britain and finding out what stories there are.
The director from the Pegasus theatre in Oxford, talks about his upcoming theatre piece.
Speaker: Jessica Riskin (University of Stanford) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on "How the Mouse Lost its Tail, Or, Lamarck's Dangerous Idea" was delivered Professor Jessica Riskin (University of Stanford).
Speaker: Jean-Claude Monond (ENS) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse hosted a workshop on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology' . This talk on "Progress, Providence, Eschaton: Löwith, Blumenberg, and After" was delivered by Jean-Claude Monond (ENS).
Speaker: Carolin Duttlinger (University of Oxford) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology'. This talk on ''Rescue in the Face of Danger: Benjamin, Goethe, Sebald'' was delivered by Carolin Duttlinger (University of Oxford).
Speaker: Hjalmar Falk (Oxford/Gothenburg) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse hosted a workshop on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology'. This talk 'The Modern Epimetheus. Carl Schmitt's Marian Katechontism' and Hjalmar Falk (Oxford/Gothenburg).
Speaker: Martin Ruehl (University of Cambridge) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a workshop on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology'. This talk on 'Ernst Kantorowicz and the Politics of Political Theology' with Martin Ruehl (University of Cambridge).
Speaker: Amir Engel (Hebrew University) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a workshop on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology'. This talk 'On Real and Imagined Catastrophes: Gershom Scholem's Sabbatinism' was delivered by Amir Engel (Hebrew University).
Speaker: Julia Ng (Goldsmith's) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes and Apocalypse hosted a workshop on 'Crises of Meaning and Political Theology'. This talk on 'Surrealism’s Political-Theological Afterlife: Benjamin—Blumenberg—Taubes' is with Julia Ng (Goldsmith's).
Knowledge Exchange is the mutually beneficial sharing of ideas, data, experience, and expertise, and involves collaboration between researchers and external organisations or the public.
Speaker: Amir Engel (Hebrew University) The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on 'Between Historiography and Literature: "Gershom Sholem's Intellectual Biography". In this talk Emir addressed the "Gershom Scholem enigma" and described the path he took in his book Gershom Scholem: an Intellectual Biography in order to unravel some of its most intriguing aspects- between his historiography of the Kabbalah and the stories that he told about his life known simply as “from Berlin to Jerusalem.” The famous Kabbalah scholar, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) occupies a central role in our intellectual imagination. He was “the creator of an academic discipline,” according to Martin Buber and is discussed by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers. Yet despite his charismatic personality and the many books and articles he wrote, there is something about him that remains mysterious and somewhat enigmatic. Who was Gershom Scholem and what is it that he contributed, most decisively to our understanding of culture, history, and politics?
Book at Lunchtime seminar on Britain's History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery, edited and written by Ryan Hanley (Fellow in History, University of Oxford). Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this ‘national sin’ by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’, and the Caribbean plantation. This collection brings together localised case studies of Britain’s history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. Editor and author Ryan Hanley (Fellow in History, University of Oxford) joins an expert panel to discuss these essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examining how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.
Ryan will be joined by Bob Harris (Professor of British History, University of Oxford), Padraic Scanlan (Assistant Professor in International History, LSE and Research Associate in History and Economics, Cambridge University). This event will be chaired by Sebabatso Manoeli (Lecturer in African History, University of Oxford)
Part of the Sacrifice Revisited event TORCH's Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a seminar on the topic of sacrifice revisiting the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological. This talk on 'Bruno Latour's Anti-sacrificial Politics' was given by Martin Crowley (University of Cambridge)
Part of the Sacrifice Revisited event TORCH's Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse hosted a seminar on the topic of sacrifice revisiting the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological. This talk on 'Meanings of ‘Sacrifice’ in Brexit Mythology' was given by Kalypso Nicolaidis (University of Oxford).
Part of the Sacrifice Revisited event TORCH's Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse hosted a seminar on the topic of sacrifice revisiting the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological. This talk on 'Gandhi, Sacrifice and the Ambiguities of Non-Violence' was given by Faisal Devji (University of Oxford).
Part of the Sacrifice Revisited event TORCH's Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a seminar on the topic of sacrifice where they revisited the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological. This talk on 'Consequentialist Extremism: Present Sacrifices for Future Dreams in the Justification of Violence' was given by Jonathan Leader Maynard (University of Oxford).
Part of the Sacrifice Revisited event TORCH's Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a seminar on the topic of sacrifice by revisiting the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological. This talk 'On Violence, Gender, and Sacrifice: Old Stories and New Reflections' was given by Kimberley Hutchings (Queen Mary University London).
Professor Ann Jefferson discusses the French novel. The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk with Professor Ann Jefferson (French, University of Oxford) on 'A Genre in Crisis: The Novel in 1940s France'. The French novel has twice been deemed to be in crisis over the course of the 20th century, first from the 1890s to the 1920s and then during the 1940s. In this talk I shall be exploring what factors were at stake in this extreme-sounding diagnosis of a literary genre.
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on 'Terminus or Renovation? Francis Bacon and Crisis in Early Modern Knowledge' with Dr Richard Serjeantson (University of Cambridge) Francis Bacon was by no means alone in his conviction that his age was experiencing a crisis in the ways in which it acquired knowledge, and in the kinds of knowledge that it valued. But he was one of the earliest and most trenchant exponents of this view in the seventeenth century, above all in his Instauratio Magna ('Great Renovation’) of 1620, with its famous frontispiece depicting a ship successfully transnavigating the extremes of the ancient world. This paper will consider the significance of the early-modern crisis of knowledge that Bacon articulated, and will assess the extent to which he saw it in apocalyptic terms. In doing so it will also offer a new suggestion about how Bacon arrived at his vision of renewal in the sciences.
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on ''Ernst Kantorowicz on Methods and Postage Stamps' given by Professor Robert Lerner (Northwestern) The talk will treat two unpublished sources: Kantorowicz's notes for his "Methods" course for graduate students at Berkeley, 1948-1950, and his paper, "Postal Stamps and the Historian." The notes give new insights into the nearly inebriating range of thought of a great historian and polymath; the paper displays the great historian at work in an unsuspected direction.
Professor Lerner will also be discussing his recent biography of Ernst Kantorowicz.
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on 'The Rise of Endless War' with Professor Samuel Moyn (Harvard University). In this talk Samuel Moyn will discuss some alternatives within the reform of warfare and the path we have taken in the past few decades – suggesting that it may have been a mistake to opt to humanize war, rather than pacify the world. Professor Moyn also discusses ideas for future work.
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk on 'Robespierre and the Politicians’ Terror' with Marisa Linton (Kingston University). Over 220 years since his death, Maximilien Robespierre continues to generate controversy, above all for his role in the French Revolutionary Terror. Historians have repeatedly turned to the problem of Robespierre’s individual personality and motivation as a means to explain the Terror. This talk contributes to the debate by situating Robespierre’s ideas, motives and actions within the wider context of the ‘politicians’ terror’, which encompassed deputies in the National Convention. The ‘politicians’ terror’ is a subject I identified and explored in my latest book, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution. This was the terror that revolutionary leaders meted out to one another. The revolutionary leaders were themselves ‘subject to terror’, both as laws to which they themselves were subject, and as the emotion of terror. By examining Robespierre’s political choices in terms of the collective revolutionary experience we can throw light on the crisis of the French Revolution. Many historians have sought answers in Robespierre’s individual personality and psychological make-up. In this paper I approach the subject from a different angle, by situating Robespierre’s choices within the wider context of the deputies of the National Convention.
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalyse network have hosted an event on 'Dystopia Today' with Greg Claeys (Royal Holloway, University of London). What does it mean to say, as so many now do, that we live in "dystopian" times? With widespread anxiety introduced by Brexit, the Trump presidency, and comparisons with Hitler, and the 1930s, and environmental catastrophe looming, are we on the cusp of a new dystopia? Gregory Claeys considers what dystopia means to us, how the literary tradition helps us to engage with it, and what to do about it.
Greg Claeys is the author of the recently published Dystopia: A Natural History.
On Thursday 16 March 2017, Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown gave a talk with Dr Jamie Lorimer (School of Geography and the Environment) and Dr Nicola Fawcett (Medical Sciences Division) on the subject of Germs Revisited. The talk discusses bad germs, friendly bacteria and whether we need to rethink our relationships with the microscopic world! The talk draws on past and present ideas from medicine, fiction and art to discuss new ways of thinking about human-microbe relationships along with developing trends in microbiome studies.
Opening event in TORCH Headline Series exploring 'Humanities & Identities' Marvin Rees (Mayor of Bristol) speaks at the TORCH Annual Headline Series Launch Event 2017. Funded from the Vice-Chancellor’s Diversity Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, TORCH’s Annual Headline Series for 2017 is Humanities & Identities. The series will focus on multiple research areas relating to diversity including race, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, religion, class, and inequality. Introduced by the Vice-Chancellor Professor Louise Richardson, this opening event brought together a panel of experts from across the Humanities and the cultural and political sectors to discuss "What does diversity mean to me?". The panel examined how diversity and inclusivity has shaped, and will continue to shape, the human experience and identity.
Book at Lunchtime event. This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of “lyric” and “state” as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.
The book's author, Professor Ben Bollig (Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) explored the issues raised with:
Maria del Pilar Blanco (Professor in Spanish American Literature, University of Oxford) Eduardo Posada-Carbo (Professor of History and Politics of Latin America, University of Oxford) Leigh A. Payne (Professor of Sociology, University of Oxford)
The session was chaired by Bart van Es (Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford).
Lecture with Kalypso Nicolaidis (St Antony’s College). Respondent: Anand Menon (King’s College London) Convenors: Timothy Garton Ash and Kalypso Nicolaidis (St Antony’s College). The event was co-sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Centre for International Studies at DPIR.
Professor Richard Wolin (CUNY) delivers a talk on 'Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics' for the TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network. The “Cosmic Circle” was a Männerbund (society of men), anchored by the inimitable Stefan George, that prowled the Bohemian districts of fin-de-siècle Munich. Its members were committed aesthetes who celebrated matriarchy and hierarchy, engaged in séances and bacchanalia, and, during the late 1890s, hatched a improbable scheme to awaken a comatose Nietzsche through free form dance. They flirted with Ariosophy and contributed to Stefan George’s yearbook, Blätter für die Kunst, which unashamedly featured a swastika on its cover. Among its members were: Ludwig Klages, Alfred Schuler, and Karl Wolfskehl – the so-called “Jewish Cosmic.”
Walter Benjamin eulogized the Cosmics: he corresponded with Klages and employed their ideas as the methodological cornerstone of his celebrated Arcades Project. Why did he revere their work, and why has the “Cosmic connection” been so little discussed in run-of-the-mill Benjamin scholarship?
The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network hosted a talk ‘Language, crisis and affect: Muted emotions in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas’ with Dr Tobias Heinrich (University of Oxford). Please note, there was a technical issue with recording which meant that the second half of the lecture is cut, it ends at 38:29. We apologise for this.
Scott Hale (Senior Data Scientist) delivers a talk as part of the Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize Talks at Linguamania, Ashmolean Museum. Scott Hale (Senior Data Scientist) delivers a talk as part of the Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize Talks at Linguamania, Ashmolean Museum.
Dr Karen Park delivers a Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize talk as part of Linguamania Dr Karen Park (Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Linguist for the Ethno-Ornithology World Archive) delivers a talk on 'Musings from Cloud Cuckoo Land' as part of the Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize Talks at Linguamania at the Ashmolean Museum.
The book's author Sondra Hausner (Professor of Anthropology, University of Oxford) will explore the issues raised in her book. Every month, a ragtag group of Londoners gather in the site known as Crossbones Graveyard to commemorate the souls of medieval prostitutes believed to be buried there—the “Winchester Geese,” women who were under the protection of the Church but denied Christian burial. In the Borough of Southwark, not far from Shakespeare's Globe, is a pilgrimage site for self-identified misfits, nonconformists, and contemporary sex workers who leave memorials to the outcast dead. Ceremonies combining raucous humor and eclectic spirituality are led by a local playwright, John Constable, also known as John Crow. His interpretation of the history of the site has struck a chord with many who feel alienated in present-day London. Sondra L. Hausner offers a nuanced ethnography of Crossbones that tacks between past and present to look at the historical practices of sex work, the relation of the Church to these professions, and their representation in the present. She draws on anthropological approaches to ritual and time to understand the forms of spiritual healing conveyed by the Crossbones rites. She shows that ritual is a way of creating the present by mobilizing the stories of the past for contemporary purposes.
The book's author Sondra Hausner (Professor of Anthropology, University of Oxford) will explore the issues raised with: Bridget Anderson (Professor of Migration and Citizenship, University of Oxford) Diane Watt (Professor of Medieval Literature, University of Surrey) Chair: Antonia Fitzpatrick (Departmental Lecturer in History, University of Oxford)
The US Election on Social Media Panel Discussion The 2016 US presidential election was the most "electric event" in electoral history—in the fullest sense of the term. Social media played an unprecedented role in the campaigns, allowing the candidates to interact with and influence voters to a greater extent than ever before (via memes, targeted advertisements, hashtags, bots, and other mechanisms). According to Frank Speiser of SocialFlow, "This is the first true social media election."
On 1 November 2016, exactly one week before the election, the TORCH #SocialHumanities network launched with an interdisciplinary panel discussion on the US election on social media. Gemma Joyce, a social data journalist at Brandwatch, presented how the candidates spoke about each other on Twitter. Matthew Anderson, the founder of Mere Orthodoxy, explored Trump's temperament and the implications of this election for political leadership. Phil Howard, the Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, explained the role of bots and automation during the presidential debates.
These presentations were followed by an interactive discussion that dove into the role of journalists, memes vs. political cartoons, Trump's insults, the resonance of falsehoods, the 'neutrality' of Facebook and Twitter, and other aspects of how the battle for the US presidency unfolded on social media.
This Postcolonial Writing and Theory Seminar is on 'Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetic of Transitional Justice' with speaker Carrol Clarkson (University of Amsterdam).
Professor Cathy Morgan gives a talk for the FRIGHT Friday series of talks, held in the Ashmolean Museum on 25th November 2016.
Part of the Book at Lunchtime series The Book at Lunchtime series looks at Professor Lyndal Roper's new book 'Martin Luther - Renegade and Prophet' . When Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the church door of a small university town on 31 October 1517, he set off a process that changed the Western world for ever. Luther's ideas spread like wildfire. In this historical biography, the author reveals the often contradictory psychological forces that drove Luther forward. Professor Roper is joined by Professor Laura Marcus (Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford), Dr Simeon Zahl (Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Nottingham), and Professor Jas' Elsner (Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College; Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art, Faculty of Classics; Professor of Late Antique Art, Faculty of Classics). Chaired by Professor Almut Suerbaum (Associate Professor in German, University of Oxford).
With David Lubeke (University of Oregon) David Lubeke (University of Oregon) delivers the keynote speech for the 'Sharing Space in the Early Modern World' conference 24-25 June 2016. His talk was on 'Sharing Sacred Spaces in Early Modern Germany: Reflections on the Westphalian Experience’.
Neil MacGregor talks about the public engagement at the British Museum. Neil MacGregor talks about his lecture on 'The Fires of Faith', building works at the British Museum, and public engagement.
The Babsybanoo, Machionness of Winchester Lecture with Neil MacGregor Neil MacGregor (former British Museum Director) gives the Babsybanoo, Machionness of Winchester, Lecture on 'The Fires of Faith'.
With Brent Seales and Dirk Obbink Brent Seales (Professor of Computer Science, University of Kentucky) and Dirk Obbink (Associate Professor in Papyrology and Greek Literature, Faculty of Classics, Oxford) discuss their work using digital technologies to reveal and read the 'invisible library' hidden within ancient manuscripts.
How has humanities scholarship influenced biomedical research and civil liberties and how can scholars serve the common good? Entrepreneur and scholar Donald Drakeman discusses his new book, Why We Need the Humanities, exploring the value and impact of the humanities in the 21st century. He is joined by Stefan Collini (Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge and author of What Are Universities For?), Richard Ekins (Tutorial Fellow in Law, St John's College, University of Oxford), and Jay Sexton (Associate Professor of American History, University of Oxford). Chaired by Helen Small (Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford and author of The Value of the Humanities)
Fred Donner (University of Chicago) addresses the nebulous, often misunderstood concept of 'umma' in early Islam In this keynote lecture Fred Donner of the University of Chicago addresses the nebulous, often misunderstood concept of ‘umma’ in early Islam in general, and the Qur’an in particular. Fred discusses how the word has come to signify any and all forms of community in contemporary Arabic, a range of meanings that it has held since the seventh century at least. From at least the ninth century, however, it has also had the particular signification of the universal community of Muslim believers. It is this last meaning that Fred seeks to interrogate in the earliest period and Quranic text, in order to establish whether this was part of Islamic discourse from its earliest inception, or a development of the post-conquests era. Through a brilliantly close and erudite reading he picks apart the many strands and meanings of umma in the Qur’an, thereby clearly demonstrating that the sacred work has in fact a very contingent and context-based understanding of communities’ formation, rise and fall, even as it understands them as the basic organising social unit above that of the family. In the final part of his talk Fred moves on to discuss the workshop itself, and the ways in which this research is relevant - and very much not relevant - for understanding phenomena like Daesh (IS/ISIS/ISIL) in the contemporary world.
Julia Bray (University of Oxford) delivers a keynote lecture on the role of religion in identity In this keynote lecture Julia Bray of the University of Oxford takes listeners through the manifold issues involved in assessing the role of religion in identity, and the problematic nature of Anthony D. Smith’s application of the concept of chosen peoplehood to all times and all places. Julia attacks Smith’s easy slide between general theoretical statements and superficial research into his wide-ranging comparative examples, and demonstrates how misleading this apparently theoretical work can be when applied in otherwise strong scholarship. She also notes the problematic aspects of the very framing of this workshop, illustrating the role which we as academics must play in situating our work in order to forestall its misuse, not least in a contemporary world where political powers seek to weaponise academia and academics in misguided searches for radicalism. This talk, therefore, is a no-punches-held statement on the nature, role and pitfalls of academic work into religion, identity and chosenness, a must-listen piece relevant not only to the study of Islam but all fields and regions.
Ruth Scobie's bite-sized talk on a portrait of David Garrick by Johan Zoffany Dr Ruth Scobie looks at a portrait by Johan Zoffany of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick, and asks what the picture's notorious wiglessness has to do with the actor's control of his extraordinary contemporary celebrity, in a TORCH Bite-Sized Talk at the Ashmolean Museum's Live Friday: Framed! event.
A round table discussion of empire's role in identity formation across time and place. Ilya Afanasyev’s thematic introduction to the round table, longer papers on Ancient Rome, late medieval and early modern Iran and early modern Russia by Emma Dench (Harvard University), Florian Schwarz (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) and Michael Khodarkovsky (Loyola University Chicago), and shorter interventions on Late Antiquity, medieval Britain, Spanish colonialism, and post-colonial African nationalism by Bryan Ward-Perkins, Eliza Hartrich, Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard and Miles Larmer (all – University of Oxford).
A Book at Lunchtime discussion looking at the English language and how it is developing with Simon Horobin, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Martin Wynne, Philip Durkin and Susie Dent. The English Language is spoken by more than a billion people throughout the world. But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the language used today?
Simon Horobin (Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford) explores these questions with Faramerz Dabhoiwala (Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford), Martin Wynne (Digital Methods Specialist, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) and Philip Durkin (Deputy Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary) in a discussion centered around his new book 'How English Became English'.
The discussion is chaired by Susie Dent (English lexicographer and etymologist. Host of Countdown's "Dictionary Corner") and touches on topics as wide-ranging as cultural imperialism, snobbery, bullet points, Shakespeare, toilet brushes and alphabetti spaghetti.
A Book at Lunchtime discussion tracing the cultural legacy of the GDR with Karen Leeder, Dennis Tate, Sara Jones, Marc Silberman and Tom Smith 'Rereading East Germany: Literature and Film in the GDR' is the first volume to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed. The editor of the volume Karen Leeder (Professor of Modern German Literature, University of Oxford) discusses these issues with Dennis Tate (Professor of German Studies, University of Bath), Sara Jones (Senior Birmingham Fellow, University of Birmingham) and Marc Silberman (Professor of German, University of Wisconsin-Madison). The discussion is chaired by Tom Smith (Lecturer in German, University of Oxford).
Highlights from the Knowledge Exchange Showcase, 26 November 2015. Highlights from the Knowledge Exchange Showcase at Ertgeun House on the 26th November 2015. Featuring Knowledge Exchange Fellows: Dr Joshua Hordern; Dr Andrew Papanikitas; Barry Murnane; Laura Tunbridge; Martyn Harry; and Tiffany Stern.
The closing reflections of speakers Professor Joshua Hordern and Stephen Bergman. Professor Joshua Hordern and Stephen Bergman offer their closing reflection from the What Can Policy-Makers Learn from the Humanities? event in September 2015.
A Book at Lunchtime discussion of Iain Pears' interactive novel Arcadia “The Arcadia App is one of the most substantial and interesting works of interactive fiction released last year” begins Emily Short. In this Book at Lunchtime event for the TORCH Humanities in the Digital Age series, the writer Iain Pears, with the academic Sophie Ratcliffe and cross-media authors Alex Butterworth, Emily Short and Richard Beard, discussed his new novel, Arcadia, which takes the form of a print book and an interactive app: offering a range of ways into an adventure story set in 1960s Oxford and the fantasy Anterworld. In this video, the panel talks about the book’s place within a growing corpus of hypertext and digital forms of fiction which are allowing writers to experiment with narrative and narrators, ideas of time, world-building, the experience of reading, and the role of the reader.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Stuart Lee and Margaret Kean explore the digital afterlives of these celebrated storytellers The city of Oxford has been home to some of the world’s greatest writers and has inspired countless stories for all ages. This discussion celebrates Oxford as a place of stories and storytelling, and examines how Oxford tales have been re-shaped across different digital media. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford) examines the character of Lewis Carroll and the creation of 'Alice in Wonderland'. Stuart Lee (Member of the English Faculty and Merton College, University of Oxford) traces how Tolkien's Middle-earth and especially ‘The Lord of the Rings’ have been reimagined through a range of digital technologies, from games to films. Margaret Kean (Helen Gardner Fellow in English, St Hilda's College, University of Oxford) discusses how Philip Pullman plays with the idea of communication across different media in ‘His Dark Materials’.
A panel discussion with Howard Hotson, Andrew Prescott, Dave De Roure and Heather Viles Are the Humanities More Digital than the Sciences? A panel discussion with Howard Hotson, Andrew Prescott, Dave De Roure and Heather Viles. Part of the Humanities and the Digital Age TORCH 2016 Headline Series. The presumption is often that the relationship between the humanities and sciences will be one-way, and that it will be the humanities learning from sciences. But what can sciences learn from the way that the humanities are using digital output for their research?
In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks what are the prospects for employment? In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks, what are the prospects for employment, who should own and control online expertise, and what tasks should be reserved exclusively for people? The Future of the Professions predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century.
The authors Richard Susskind OBE (Author, speaker, and independent adviser) and Daniel Susskind (Lecturer in Economics, Balliol College, University of Oxford) explore these questions with Joshua Hordern (Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Oxford Healthcare Values Partnership), Vili Lehdonvirta (Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute) and Judy Wajcman (Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics). Chaired by Kathryn Eccles (Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute and Digital Humanities Champion, Humanities Division, University of Oxford).
A roundtable discussion to mark the publication of Alice Kelly's critical edition of Edith Wharton's First World War reportage Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Panellists; Professor Dame Hermione Lee (Wolfson College, Oxford), Dr Shafquat Towheed (Open University), Dr Alice Kelly (TORCH, Oxford). Chaired by Professor Elleke Boehmer (Director, TORCH).
Dr Carolyne Larrington gives a talk about Game of Thrones and the often complicated morality its characters have. Part of the Ashmolean Live Friday event on 29th January 2016.
Dr Alessia Pannese explores a painted documentation of a relatively little known event in Oxford local history: the first intravenous anaesthesia during this TORCH Bite-Size talk at the Ashmolean Museum LiveFriday The introduction of anaesthesia in medical practice is generally attributed to American dentist William Morton, who gave a public demonstration in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1846. However, recent research indicates that a crucial attempt was carried out by apothecary Robert Boyle in Oxford almost two centuries earlier
Jessica Goodman explores how the meaning of ‘hero’ shifted in France in the late eighteenth-century in this TORCH Bite-Size talk at the Ashmolean Museum LiveFriday. In the late eighteenth century the French start rethinking what a hero is - it's not about wars and kings and soldiers any more, but people like writers and artists and scientists, who make a useful (and sometimes moral) contribution to the nation through means other than military glory. In this TORCH bite-size talk Jessica explores this shift and its influence on the creation of the Panthéon, which was a huge secular temple to house the bodies of these 'great men'.
How have digital technologies changed research practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities? Professor Eric T. Meyer (Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford) discusses his book 'Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities' with Lucie Burgess (Associate Director for Digital Libraries, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford), Dr Kathryn Eccles (Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford) and Dr James Smithies (Director of King's Digital Lab and Module Convenor for Internships in the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College London).
In this paper Dr. Arezou Azad focused on the region of Balkh in the north of modern-day Afghanistan, ancient Bactria Noting that identities are not static, but constantly shifting, she examined the interplay between processes of self-definition and memory. Thus the land of Balkh is approached as a lieu de memoire, a site of memory that provides a useful prism through which to view the construction of historical identities. Emphasising the importance of Balkh’s geographical-topographical context as a broad and once-walled oasis, Arezou noted the land was a distinct and distinctly imagined space, a wealthy city of the medieval Silk Road. Forming part of historical Khorasan, Balkh is primarily remembered today as the homeland of the great Persian poets of the Middle Ages and the birthplace of Sufism, for example producing the mystic and poet known today as ‘Rumi.’ In these understandings ‘Balkhiness’ is Islamic and Persian, but not ‘Iranian’ – although in the current context of Tajik-Uzbek political rivalry this is changing. In pre-Islamic times, however, Balkh was only loosely governed by the Sasanian polity, a particular region with its own identified language, Bactrian, and religion, Buddhism. Yet this is only known through Chinese sources, since medieval Arabic and Persian texts merely evoke vague ‘Indic,’ Buddha-praising (botparast) or ‘Zoroastrian’ pre-Islamic cults. Certainly, the iteration of Buddhism practiced in the region was particular and unique, but the totality of the loss of memory remains striking. Ultimately Arezou argued that in this multi-lingual frontier land the development of ‘New’ Persian – a language almost identical to modern Farsi – was constitutive of the reimagining of an Abrahamic and Zoroastrian past, crystallised in a Perso-Islamic historiographical tradition. Represented by such processes as the formalisation of the epic tradition that would become Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, it is this development which results in the ‘forgetting’ of Balkh’s Buddhist past.
Dr. Djene Bajalan talks as part of the Language and Community from the Armenian to Iranian Plateaux series Dr. Djene Bajalan focuses in his presentation on the use of Kurdish ethnicity for political mobilisation in the early modern period, particularly within the Ottoman Empire. In the last fifteen to twenty years, with the partial liberalisation of the Turkish political space and the comparative success of Iraqi Kurdistan, there have been certain revisions of the old primordialist narrative that traced ‘the Kurds’ back to ‘the Medes’ – and even posited unitary Kurdishness at the time of the Indo-European migrations. Rather, younger scholars have argued that modern Kurdish nationalism is fundamentally ‘modern,’ a product of the socio-economic, political, and intellectual environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, even in these recent revisions what ‘it meant’ to participate in Kurdishness prior to the age of nationalism has been ignored or treated as irrelevant. Thus, we are told, this is not nationalism – yet the question begs, what then is it?
In this presentation Djene gives an overview of the contexts in which Kurdishness was mobilised in the early modern period, and asks several specific questions:
1) What were the political implications of Kurdishness?
2) What do manifestations of Kurdish ethnic awareness signify?
3) Is it possible to speak of an ethnic Kurdish solidarity?
4) Is it useful or meaningful to talk of continuities between pre-modern and modern iterations of Kurdishness?
In answering these questions Djene utilises variety of approaches. The first is a ‘top down’ state perspective, analysing how imperial systems and – perhaps more importantly – imperial administrators perceived the Kurds as a group and incorporated this image into state policy. The second is an internal Kurdish perspective, delineated in three contexts: Kurdishness as an element of distinction in socio-economic and political hierarchies; Kurdishness as revealed by the Sharafnama, a literary history of Kurdish principalities written in 1597; and Kurdishness as revealed by myths of origin. In these three contexts Djene takes us through the many socio-economic, cultural, and political factors which coalesced into particular understandings of ‘being Kurdish.’ Ultimately, he demonstrates that these understandings are always contingent on the particular constellation of factors present in any given instance.
Opening remarks from Ilya Afanasyev and Nicholas S M Matheou In the opening remarks Ilya first discusses the research network itself, outlining how it came about and its core aims. Nicholas then introduces the present workshop, discussing its concept and arrangement, and emphasising that this is not simply a matter of deconstructing ‘the past,’ but also the question of how best to equip ourselves for ‘the present’ and ‘future.’
A librarian, literary scholar, museum director and digital commentator explore how the digital age has shaped, and will continue to shape, the human experience and the humanities The TORCH Humanities and the Digital Age series will explore the relationship between Humanities and the digital. It will consider digital’s at once disruptive and creative potential, and imagine future territory to be prospected. Underpinning this is perhaps the most important question of all: What does it mean to be human in the digital age? How might it reshape the way we create meaning and values? In this opening event we bring together a panel of experts from across the Humanities and the cultural sector to examine how the digital age has shaped, and will continue to shape, the human experience and the Humanities. We are joined by Tom Chatfield (author and broadcaster), Chris Fletcher (Professorial Fellow at Exeter College, Member of the English Faculty and Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library) Diane Lees (Director-General of Imperial War Museum Group) and Emma Smith (Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford). The discussion is chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley (Master, Pembroke College).
Launch event for the TORCH programme Oxford Medieval Studies The launch event for the TORCH programme Oxford Medieval Studies included speakers: Emma Dillon (Professor of Music, King's College London); Henrike Lähnemann (Chair of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics, University of Oxford); David Wallace (Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania); and Chris Wickham (Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford).
Christine Allison gives a talk as part of The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationhood workshop This paper arises out of a monograph I am writing on how the Kurds talk about the past. The ideas of Kurdish suffering and Kurdish victimhood are fundamental to the way Kurdish identity is constructed, both in the Kurdish homelands and the diaspora. This is also the case for Kurdish collective memory (which is intimately linked to Kurdish identity). Clearly Kurds have indeed suffered many violent events over the past century, but this is not at issue – what I examine here is how events of the past have been mediated into discourse. Kurdish narratives of the past tend to emphasise Kurdish suffering and victimhood, rather than Kurdish victories and achievements, and in this paper I will outline how this discourse of memory is formed, who is forming it, and why – what social and political purposes does it serve to frame the past in this way?
Boris James gives a talk as part of the The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationhood workshop Since their inception Arabic and Persian historiographies have produced a relatively coherent set of information about the Kurds. Historians can read in these texts elements that defined the boundaries of Kurdish medieval identity. Although the latter was constantly constructed and reconstructed, this potentially infinite process was technically limited by a series of factors. I will focus on two historical situations each one highlighting one factor that contributed to the shaping of Kurdish medieval identity. The first lies at the beginning of Arabic historiography (10th - 11th centuries) when Kurdishness was an implicit category defined in opposition or association with ‘arab or ‘ajam categories in the context of the domination of an Arab caliphate. Arab authors first tried to understand ethnic differentiation based on familiar tools existing in Bedouin societies; primarily the fragmentation into tribes and clans and membership of a lineage dating back to an eponymous ancestor. This limited range of analytical tools also possessed a political and ideological aspect – namely the need to maintain the cohesion of the early caliphate and its army. The second period starts with the collapse of the Ayyubid dynasty and the beginning of the Mamluk regime (second half of the 13th century). Kurdish identity underwent then a specific reproduction due to the shift of its political and military role in the context of marginalization in Syria and Egypt and war between the Mongols and Mamluks. Mamluk policies were somewhat paradoxical, promoting both integration and differentiation. These policies reflected their desire to create a powerful coalition against the Mongols through reinforcing the notion of the Kurds as a distinct category, while at the same time territorializing it.
Ahmad Ashraf gives a talk as part of the The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationhood workshop In this presentation Professor Ahmad Ashraf discusses the formation of the traditional Iranian and Persian historical narrative, focusing particularly on the period from the Islamic conquest to the Safavid era. The origin of Iran’s traditional history, a mixture of fact and fiction concerning the pre-Islamic era, can be traced to traditions relating to ancient Avestan ideas on the formation of man, the creation of kingship, and social order. These traditions were transmitted orally until the last decades of the Sassanian Empire in the seventh century, when they were formalised into a set of now-lost literary texts. Their reception in the Islamic era was conditioned by factors of random survival and particular use, notably instrumentalised during the Persian cultural revival from the tenth century onwards, when the political context of regional Iranian polities favoured such developments. Elaborating the internal variations while highlighting the comparatively early formalisation of this tradition, Ahmad notes the remarkable fact that this medieval understanding remained the commonly shared historical vision of ‘Iran’ and ‘Persianness’ all the way to the late nineteenth century. Most striking are the things left out of this vision, notably the Achaemenid shahanshahs, a point that emphasises the multiplicity of possibilities in even the most reified and apparently fixed of historical narratives.
Tim Greenwood gives a talk as part of the The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationhood workshop Pre-modern identities are situational, specific to the time and the context in which they are constructed and deployed. They are also oppositional, constructed in response to surrounding communities. The ‘other’ takes many different forms but when it loses its ‘otherness’ the identity begins to collapse. In Late Antiquity, Armenianness was constructed in terms of an imagined community of Christians and devised in opposition to an impious, ‘ash-worshipping’ Persian shahanshah and his empire of Eran. This was depicted by Ełišē but continued to hold meaning into the ninth century. T‘ovma Arcruni based his descriptions of the caliph Ja‘far al-Mutawakkil and the Sajid emir Afshīn on Ełišē’s shahanshah Yazdegerd II. Yet T‘ovma was clearly struggling to fit contemporary realities to the historical template. If prominent Arcruni princes were seeking to profit from establishing ties with the Sajids, they could not easily be represented as oppressed and persecuted for their faith. An anonymous continuator confirms that the ‘otherness’ of the Persians was fast receding. Yūsuf b.Abi’l Sāj and Gagik Arcruni are portrayed discussing profound questions and aspects of kingship. This passage evokes contemporary Persianate salon culture. Evidently a process of political and social transformation was underway, with traditional loyalties and identities breaking down. Armenian identity was also constructed in opposition to that great imperial ‘other’ to the west, the Byzantine Empire. Disdaining Byzantium is a feature of earlier historical compositions but three tenth-century works attest a major shift. The History of Tarōn offers a radical retelling of the conversion of Armenia, in which relationship with Caesarea in Cappadocia is stressed. The History of Uxt‘anēs attests a renewed interest in Armenian involvement with the classical Roman past. The Universal History of Step‘anos Tarōnec‘i attest an author searching for new ways of projecting and preserving Armenian identity in the face of an expanding Byzantium, no longer distant or ‘other’ but present and familiar. This is the context in which a radically different sense of Armenianness, rooted in urban communities, emerged briefly in the eleventh century.
Speaker: Bert Fragner (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna). Part of the Language and Community from the Armenian to Iranian Plateaux: Armenian, Kurdish and Iranian Identities before Modernity event hosted by TORCH Network The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood.
Environmental researcher Paul Jepson’s presentation at ‘The Oxford Dodo: Culture at the Crossroads’ Paul Jepson (Researcher at the School of Geography and Environment and Course Director for the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management) gives a presentation at ‘The Oxford Dodo: Culture at the Crossroads’, an event celebrating the life and legacy of the famous creature in collaboration between the Museum of Natural History and TORCH.
Historian of Science Pietro Corsi’s presentation at ‘The Oxford Dodo: Culture at the Crossroads’ Historian of Science Pietro Corsi’s presentation at ‘The Oxford Dodo: Culture at the Crossroads’
Medical Humanities and Narratives Interview with Professor Stephen Lammers as part of the Knowledge Exchange project (Compassion and Healthcare) discussing "Medical Humanities and Narratives"
Elleke Boehmer discusses her new book with Megan Robb, Faisal Devji and Santanu Das Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford) discusses her new book with Megan Robb (Lecturer of Hindi and Urdu, Oriental Institute, and Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford), Faisal Devji (University Reader in Modern South Asian History, University of Oxford) and Santanu Das (Reader of English Literature, Kings College London). The discussion is introduced and chaired by Professor James Belich (Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History, University of Oxford).
Elleke Boehmer's book "Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire" explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book's four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration. Focusing on a range of remarkable Indian 'arrivants' -- scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore -- "Indian Arrivals" examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange.
Part of "Book at Lunchtime", a fortnightly series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Xiaofan Amy Li discusses her new book "Comparative Encounters Between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi." Xiaofan Amy Li (Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature and Translation, University of Oxford), with Marina Warner (Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford), Wang Xing (DPhil student in Oriental Studies, University of Oxford), read a review by Prof Lloyd and Matthew Reynolds (Times Lecturer in English, University of Oxford)
The encounter between different minds and perspectives across time and space has always haunted the literary and philosophical imagination. Just such an encounter is staged and played out in this comparative study, which connects the twentieth-century Francophone writers Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Henri Michaux (1899-1984) with the ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi (c. 4th-3rd century BCE). These disparate texts are bridged by questions that draw them into close dialogue: how can Artaud and Michaux, who read about and admired ancient Chinese literature and culture, be rethought through certain philosophical concerns that the Zhuangzi raises? If the points of conceptual intersection focus on rationality, cosmology and ethics, what can they tell us about these important issues? By imagining, constructing and developing this thought-encounter, Li re-envisages Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi through the kaleidoscope of comparative interpretation, juxtaposing and recombining ideas and contexts to form new patterns and meanings.
60 years since the publication of the series' final volume, a distinguished panel explore Tolkien's literary legacy To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of the final volume of Tolkien’s fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, the Bodleian Libraries and TORCH hosted a panel discussion on reactions to Tolkien’s work, then and now.
The discussion was introduced by Elleke Boehmer (Acting TORCH Director and Professor of World Literature, University of Oxford), and chaired by Stuart Lee (Lecturer in English Literature, University of Oxford). In a series of three short talks, scholars considered Tolkien's legacy from a range of perspectives.
Patrick Curry (Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Lampeter) addressed the question: “Is the Lord of the Rings a good book?”, describing Tolkien as a counter-culturalist who focused on the “primacy of storytelling”.
Dimitra Fimi (Lecturer in English, Cardiff Metropolitan University) discussed the challenges and opportunities of teaching Tolkien's work, and examined why his work is rarely a compulsory part of the university curriculum in the UK.
Andy Orchard (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford), who holds the same chair at the University of Oxford that Tolkien held from 1925 – 1945, explored Tolkien's contribution to academia, which he suggested rivals his contribution to fiction.
The panel also discussed a range of topics, including uptake of Old Norse, the literary canon and Tolkien's work with DPhil students, in response to audience questions.
Please visit www.torch.ox.ac.uk/tolkien for more information, or www.torch.ox.ac.uk/tolkien-review for a review of the discussion.
Peter Frankopan discusses his new book with Averil Cameron, Robert Moore and Elleke Boehmer Peter Frankopan (Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, University of Oxford) discusses his book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World with Averil Cameron (Former Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History, University of Oxford) and Robert Moore (Emeritus Professor of History, Newcastle University). The discussion is introduced and chaired by Elleke Boehmer (Acting TORCH Director and Professor of World Literature, English)
About the book
Peter Frankopan's book is a major reassessment of world history, and is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east. For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture – and is shaping the modern world.
"The time is ripe for this new history of the world, which places the emphasis firmly on the east, from eastern Europe to India and China. A journey along the Silk Road, from the birth of the world's ancient religions to contemporary international politics." Daily Telegraph
Jonathan Bate, Anne Farrar Donovan, Seamus Perry and Oliver Taplin discuss life-writing, poetry and the poet To celebrate the publication of Jonathan Bate's new biography Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life we were joined by a distinguished panel to discuss life-writing, poetry and the poet.
Seamus Perry (Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford) explores Hughes's seductive personality and poetry, and his 'genius for mythologisation', and describes how Jonathan Bate's new biography humanises Ted Hughes.
Oliver Taplin (Former Fellow and Tutor of Classics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford) discusses Hughes's fertile and unapologetic engagement with the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, and his direct and fruitful engagement with the theatre.
Anne Farrar Donovan (cousin of Ted Hughes) shares her memories of Ted Hughes and the Farrar family and of Hughes's time in Heptonstall.
In response to audience questions, Jonathan Bate (Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford) describes how his opinion of Hughes has changed since embarking on the project and the ethics of biography.
Silke Ackermann, Nigel Biggar and Liz Bruton debate the ethics of science and scientists going to war Silke Ackermann (Director, Museum of the History of Science) Liz Bruton (Co-curator, “Dear Harry”… Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War) and Nigel Biggar (Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford) will discuss the ethics of scientists going to war in response to the current Museum of the History of Science exhibition exploring the life and legacy of talented English physicist Henry Moseley.
When Moseley was killed on the battlefield at Gallipoli in August 1915, newspapers on all sides of the conflict denounced his tragic death with one English newspaper headline proclaiming that Moseley was "too valuable to die". Moseley's death contributed to a changing attitude to scientists and science going to war with scientists and engineers being kept away from the frontline. Instead the work of scientists and engineers - research and expertise - is used to meet military goals with scientific research increasingly relying on military funding.
In this discussion, the speakers discuss the ethics of scientific research being used for military ends as well as whether scientists being held back from frontline service means others serve and die in their place.
Author Hugh Aldersey-Williams, historian of science Jo Hedesan and chemist Peter Battle discuss the ways in which the elements continue to inspire us today The chemical elements, the fundamental ingredients of all matter, have fascinated people for centuries. Their stories have been richly described in Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ bestselling book, Periodic Tales, which forms the basis for a major exhibition curated by Compton Verney Art Gallery.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is joined by historian of science Jo Hedesan (Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford) and chemist Peter Battle (Professor of Chemistry, University of Oxford) to discuss the ways in which the elements continue to inspire and fascinate us in an event supported by Compton Verney, the Department of Chemistry and TORCH.
We catch up with Cancer Research UK's Director of Digital on fundraising in the digital age. Michael Docherty discusses how digital platforms have transformed fundraising, how research and fundraising can be brought closer together, and the future of fundraising.
Michael Docherty (Cancer Research UK) on how clicktivists, slacktivists and hacktivists are helping us beat cancer sooner. At the Annual TORCH Digital Humanities lecture Michael Docherty (Digital and Strategic Marketing Planning Director, Cancer Research UK) discusses the #nomakeupselfie campaign, the difference between 'feeling digital' and 'being digital', and why we should use digital to put more control in people's hands.
Maaza reads from her novel dealing with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia during the early days of the Second World War
Fred reads fiction and poems about his childhood in Guyana, remembering his father, and slavery
A highlights video from the one-day conference Phenomenology is increasingly being employed as both a method of inquiry and a form of practice in a range of healthcare settings. This one-day conference brought together scholars of science and humanities and those engaged in phenomenological practice outside of academia to stimulate multi-disciplinary discussion around embodiment, illness, health and pain.
In this highlights video we hear from Dr Andrew Papanikitas (Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Science, University of Oxford) and Professor Anna Kirkengen (Norweigan University of Science and Technology).
A presentation by Austin Argentieri. Through highlighting some ethnographic examples and lessons from contemporary placebo research, Austin Argentieri (Oxford, Anthropology) discusses how phenomenology allows us to move beyond the distinction between biological disease and embodied illness to examine how social relationships, history, and embodied experience alter human biology and the evolution of viruses.
Historians of Science David Wootton and Michael Hunter review the controversial book 50 years on Robert Boyle's air-pump experiments in 1659 provoked a lively debate over the possibility of a vacuum. The air-pump, a complicated and expensive device, became an emblem of the new experimental science that was promoted by the Royal Society. However, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes challenged both the validity of Boyle’s experiment and the philosophical foundations of this new approach to science.
In their controversial book Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer took up Hobbes’s case, arguing that experimental findings depend for their validity on the scientific culture in which they are made. David Wootton (Anniversary Professor of History, University of York) reviews this controversy and present a new view of the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes, with responses by Robert Boyle's biographer Michael Hunter (Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck). The discussion is introduced by Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of the German, University of Oxford).
The German poet gives a special reading of old and new work and answers questions with David Constantine and Karen Leeder.
A discussion of Anna Marmodoro's book Anna Marmodoro (Fellow in Philosophy, Corpus Christi, University of Oxford) discusses her book Aristotle on Perceiving Objects with Ophelia Deroy (Associate Director, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study and Senior Researcher, Centre for the Study of the Senses), Richard Sorabji (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, King's College London) and Rowland Stout (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Oxford and Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin).
About the book: How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? Are our five senses sufficient for the perception of objects?
Aristotle investigated these questions by means of the metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and the unity of experiential content. His account remains fruitful-but also challenging-even for contemporary philosophy.
This book offers a reconstruction of the six metaphysical models Aristotle offered to address these and related questions, focusing on their metaphysical underpinning in his theory of causal powers. By doing so, the book brings out what is especially valuable and even surprising about the topic: the core principles of Aristotle's metaphysics of perception are fundamentally different from those of his metaphysics of substance. Yet, for precisely this reason, his models of perceptual content are unexplored territory. This book breaks new ground in offering an understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics of the content of perceptual experience and of the composition of the perceptual faculty.
A discussion of Jim Reed's book Jim Reed (Taylor Professor of German, University of Oxford) discusses his book Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment with Joachim Whaley (Professor of German History and Thought, University of Cambridge) and Kevin Hilliard (Lecturer in German, University of Oxford). The event is chaired by Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of German, University of Oxford)
About the book: Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment.
Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.
An interdisciplinary discussion of Jamie Lorimer's book Jamie Lorimer (Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Oxford) discusses his book with William Beinart (Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford), Daniel Grimley (Professor of Music, University of Oxford) and Nikolaj Lübecker (Associate Professor of French, University of Oxford).
In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet—Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation.
A short video about a recent exhibition of photography and film As the social, emotional and welfare costs of Alzheimer’s disease gain prominence, and with the number of sufferers predicted to reach one million by 2025, exploring the ways in which the disease affects the lives of the sufferers and those around them becomes an ever more important task. Responding to this the O3 Gallery in partnership with TORCH presented That Other Place, an exhibition exploring Alzheimer’s disease from the perspectives of sufferer and carer.
In this short video we explore why photography is a valuable tool for documenting the effects of Alzheimer's and the relationship between art and research. We are joined by Victoria McGuinness (Business Manager, TORCH), Helen Statham (Director, O3 Gallery) and Nicola Onions (Artist).
An interdisciplinary discussion exploring the many possible approaches to representing science through the arts, as well as potential challenges The discussion begins with a presentation by Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Associate Professor in Modern Drama, University of Oxford) examining plays that have included scientific content from the Victorian era to Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn. She will also explore the concept of “mediation”, examining how Frayn and Stoppard mediate the science using biography, history, and metaphor. This will be followed by responses from Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford), Dr Jason Gaiger (Associate Professor, Contemporary Art History, University of Oxford) and Annie Cattrell (Artist, Tutor at the Royal College of Art and Reader in Fine Art at DeMontfort University). The discussion is chaired by Dr Dan O'Connor (Head of Humanities and Social Science, Wellcome Trust).
Wayne McGregor (Director, Random Dance) talks about his choreographic practice with Dr Phil Barnard, (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge) and Eckhard Thiemann (Arts Producer).
A Book at Lunchtime discussion with Tom McLeish, Sally Shuttleworth, John Christie and Ard A. Louis An interdisciplinary discussion about Tom McLeish's "Faith and Wisdom in Science".
About the book:
"Do you have wisdom to count the clouds?" asks the voice of God from the whirlwind in the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions from the Old Testament Book of Job. Tom McLeish takes a scientist's reading of this ancient text as a centrepiece to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, Faith and Wisdom in Science challenges much of the current 'science and religion' debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. Its narrative approach develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy - the 'love of wisdom of natural things' - that can draw on theological and cultural roots. Following the theme of pain in human confrontation with nature, it develops a 'Theology of Science', recognising that both scientific and theological worldviews must be 'of' each other, not holding separate domains. Science finds its place within an old story of participative reconciliation with a nature, of which we start ignorant and fearful, but learn to perceive and work with in wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity. There are urgent lessons for education, the political process of decision-making on science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, and the way that both religious and secular communities alike celebrate and govern science.
An interdisciplinary discussion exploring the role of randomness and order in physics, probability, history and music. The discussion begins with a 20 minute presentation by Professor Ian Walmsley (Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics & Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Oxford), followed by three c. 8 minute responses from:
Professor Jonathan Cross (Professor of Musicology, University of Oxford) Professor Alison Etheridge (Professor of Probability, University of Oxford) Professor Chris Wickham (Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford)
Chaired by Professor Stephen Tuck (Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Oxford)
For related videos and more information about the Humanities and Science series please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/humsciox
Professor Larry Squire and Dr Simon Kemp Larry Squire: ‘Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems of the Mammalian Brain’ Distinguished Professor Larry Squire (UCSD), whose pioneering work established the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, discusses the structure and organization of memory.
Simon Kemp: 'Unconscious Memory from Proust to the Present' Dr Simon Kemp (Somerville, Oxford), explores how memory and the unconscious intertwine in literature from Proust to the contemporary novel, and consider what light might be shed by new perspectives on the nature and functioning of unconscious memory offered by cognitive neuroscience.
One of the UK's leading scientists, Marcus du Sautoy, argues that mathematical proofs are not just number-based, but also a form of narrative. Literary techniques and mathematical proofs are rarely, if ever, brought together but Marcus du Sautoy is very interested in the qualities that the narrative of proofs share with other narrative art forms. In an unusually multidisciplinary panel, he is joined by author Ben Okri, mathematician Roger Penrose, and literary scholar Laura Marcus, to consider how narrative underpins and nurtures the respective disciplines.
The author discusses her new book, exploring the interplay between fiction and history, the redefinition of the common, and family history
Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins introduces a new research project which examines the origins and development of the cult of Christian saints.
An AHRC funded workshop for Early Career researchers On 7th and 8th April early career researchers from around the UK came to Oxford to be trained in the art of storytelling. Professional storytellers Daniel Morden and Jenny Moon provided dedicated workshops that honed the participants’ story adaptation and performance skills. We caught up with the storytellers and project organisers to find out more about the project and what makes a good story.
For more information please visit http://www.medievalstorytelling.co.uk/ or follow @MedStorytelling on Twitter.
The Medieval Storytelling project is funded by the AHRC.
The author discusses her recent book on dance in urban Senegal. At the TORCH Book at Lunchtime, author Hélène Neveu Kringelbach discussed her book Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-fashioning in Urban Senegal with a multi-disciplinary panel of scholars. The book uses dance as a window onto social change, looking at how people use their bodies to engage with different social worlds and negotiate boundaries. We caught up with her after the discussion.
An interdisciplinary discussion of Dr Emily Troscianko's book A discussion of Dr Emily Troscianko's "Kafka's Cognitive Realism", which uses insights from the cognitive sciences to illuminate Kafka’s poetics, exemplifying a paradigm for literary studies in which cognitive-scientific insights are brought to bear directly on literary texts. Commentators from English, Psychology and Modern Languages bring ingsights from a variety of perspectives.
Ahadf Soueif, Paul Smith and Robin Kelley discuss how the humanities can solve global challenges In this discussion, Ahdaf Soueif Paul Smith and Robin Kelley discuss the active role of the humanities in addressing contemporary crises, drawing from their own experiences before opening up the discussion and inviting audience questions.
This was part of Activist Humanities in the World (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/activist-humanities), a conference partnered by SOAS, TORCH and UVA, and supported by the British Council, bringing together 30 leading scholars from every (peopled) continent to discuss the active role of the humanities in a comparative and connected global context.
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into more than 30 languages), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. Ms Soueif is also a political and cultural commentator. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. Her articles for the Guardian in the UK are also published in the European press, and she writes a weekly column (in Arabic) for the national daily, al-Shorouk, in Egypt.
Robin Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA who has written extensively on social movements, the African diaspora and radical change. His books include the prize-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, 2012); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2000), and is currently completing a general survey of African American history co-authored with Tera Hunter and Earl Lewis to be published by Norton.
Paul Smith is Director of the British Council in the USA and Cultural Counsellor at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.. A 30-year veteran of the British Council, the UK's international cultural relations organization, his previous postings include Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Burma, New Zealand and Chile. Most recently, he led the British Council's offices in Afghanistan and in Egypt. His interests include history, international cultural relations and all the arts, especially drama. He has directed plays, particularly Shakespeare, in various countries and has published numerous articles. He was awarded the OBE by the Queen in 1999.
How can the Liberal Humanities own up to – and promote – its public service as a matrix of civic virtue? Whether in banks or on the battlefield, in the NHS or in national newspapers, the need for virtuous leadership is now patent. An education in the humanities is, in fact, an education in virtues that are at once intellectual and civic, underscoring its importance for non-economic public flourishing. Such moral formation would be much more effective, however, were it openly professed and discussed. But the predominant liberal ideal, aspiring to neutrality on the Good Life, tends to suppress such profession. How, then, can Liberal Humanities own up to – and promote – its public service as a matrix of civic virtue?
Part of Humanities and the Public Good series (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/publicgood)
Book at Lunchtime interview with Karen Brown and William Beinart about their book “African Knowledge and Livestock Health” Part of the "Book at Lunchtime" series at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
Panel discussion on what it means to invest in the humanities The opening event of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)'s headline series, The Humanities and the Public Good, bringing together leading scholars from the arts and sciences and beyond to consider the role of the Humanities in addressing contemporary challenges. A round-table discussion introduced by Andrew Hamilton, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and chaired by Professor Shearer West, Head of Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. The event begins with a short presentation by Dr Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, called "In Everyone’s Interests: What it Means to Invest in the Humanities", followed by responses from, and a round-table discussion involving, one of the UK’s most eminent scientists, the chief arts writer from the Guardian, a renowned author and the director of a higher education policy think tank.
Knowledge Exchange Fellow Oliver Cox (@OliverJWCox) from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) asked members of the public, students and academics in Oxford whether humanities subjects are worth investing in. This question will be asked again at the opening event of TORCH's Humanities and the Public Good Series on Monday 27 January at the Mathematical Institute, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter from 5pm. Introduced by the Vice-Chancellor Professor Andrew Hamilton and chaired by the Head of the Humanities Division Professor Shearer West, the event brings together leading scholars in the humanities and sciences, and influential figures beyond academia, to consider the role of the humanities in addressing contemporary challenges.
Professor Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will give an opening presentation entitled In Everyone's Interests: What it Means to Invest in the Humanities. This will be followed by a roundtable discussion including David Willetts (Universities Minister), Hermione Lee (President of Wolfson College and Biographer), Marcus du Sautoy (Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science) and Charlotte Higgins (Chief Arts Writer, The Guardian).
Visit http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk for more information and find TORCH on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TORCHOxford.
David Starkey, Chris Stamatakis and Diarmaid MacCulloch discuss ‘Thomas Wyatt - The Heart’s Forest’ by Susan Brigden as part of the TORCH Book Series Winner of the 2012 Wolfson History Prize, 'The Heart’s Forest' is a biography of renaissance poet Thomas Wyatt, which reveals the fascinating history of his life in Henry VIII's court. His poetry held a mirror to this secret, capricious world, and alluded darkly to events which it was dangerous for him to mention. Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) was the first modern voice in English poetry. His poetry holds a mirror to the secret, capricious world of Henry VIII's court, and alludes darkly to events which it might be death to describe. In the Tower, twice, Wyatt was betrayed and betrayer.
But this original biography is much more than a conventional life. It is an evocation of Wyatt among his friends and his enemies, at princely courts in England, Italy, France and Spain, or alone in contemplative retreat. Using new research, Susan Brigden aims to show Wyatt in all his diversity, exploring his love, faith and politics and the beginnings of Reformation England. Above all, this new biography is attuned to Wyatt's dissonant voice and broken lyre, his paradoxical inwardness and will to 'make plain' his heart, revealing a complex, elusive, endlessly fascinating figure.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o delivers the opening keynote lecture of the Calloloo conference 'The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa' was held at Pembroke College, Oxford, in November 2013. This conference advances and challenges the newest theoretical scholarship emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of U.S.A.-derived Diaspora Studies and British-derived Trans-Atlantic Studies, as these fields have diverged and converged in relation to the idea of Africa. 'The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa' also showcases African Diasporan creative writers, established and emerging, from Africa, the Caribbean, the UK, and the USA for readings in Oxford and London.
The Selden Map of China has been one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library since 1659. This film shows how this remarkable map is interpreted today by scholars from a range of different disciplines. A New Interdisciplinary Take on a Bodleian Treasure.
Sophie Bocksberger, Berrow Scholar, Classics, talks about collaborative workshops involving classical historians, professionally-trained dancers, and anthropologists to create "reconstructive" performances of the Roman dance form tragoedia saltata.