HRC event report for 29^th and 30^th September 2023: ‘Afterlives of an Essay’ conference

Conference organised by: Dr Caroline Summers (University of Warwick), Dr Ian Ellison (University of Kent, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main), and Dr Arianna Autieri (Goldsmiths, University of London).

HRC money was secured to help cover keynote travel costs. Other funding was received from the ILCS, MHRA, Goldsmiths University of London and Warwick SMLC.

Conference report

The conference took place on 29^th and 30^th September 2023 and was hosted at the University of Warwick .

The main objective of the conference was to invite critical engagement with Benjamin’s seminal essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’ [‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers]. Our intention was to invite papers from across a range of disciplinary perspectives, and to engage both younger and more experienced scholars in the discussion of a key text in the discipline of Translation Studies.

Due to UCU industrial action, the original conference programme of papers and panels across 2 days was adjusted to fit all academic papers into the second day of the schedule. The first day therefore presented an opportunity for delegates to engage with the conference theme off-campus through planned activities, as follows:

· A visit to the Migrating Dreams and Nightmares exhibit at Common Ground (Fargo Village, Coventry), including a discussion with curators Nirmal Puwar and Kate Rosslin on the experience of putting together this narrative of the linguistic and physical translation of migrants between spaces;

· A visit and tour of Coventry Cathedral as a space that embodies concepts of afterlife and rebirth, with Nirmal Puwar (BA Fellow at Coventry Cathedral);

· Screening and discussion of Nirmal Puwar’s film Unravelling (2008) in the Chapter House (Coventry Cathedral);

· The opportunity to visit the Herbert Gallery with its various holdings, including more information on the history of Coventry Cathedral and the city itself;

· Conference dinner at Bistrot Pierre in Coventry, attended by almost all delegates.

The academic focus of the conference was on Saturday 30^th September, which is also celebrated as International Translation Day since it is the feast day of St Jerome. The conference programme consisted of 4 standard panels, 2 keynote papers and a dialogue between two established scholars and translators. Delegates commented favourably on the range of papers and the quality of the keynotes. Since panels ran consecutively, the audience for the various papers was not divided: while this made for a long day, it ensured that discussions from the panel sessions could flow naturally into conversations in the scheduled breaks and helped to establish a feeling of continuity throughout the day.

There were 35 official delegates, including PhD researchers, Early Career Academics, established scholars and retired members of the academic community. Participants came from across the UK and Ireland, as well as from mainland Europe, Turkey, the USA and Hong Kong. This diversity was also reflected in the range of presenters.

Traditional keynotes were delivered by Dr Julia Ng (Goldsmiths) and Professor Duncan Large (BCLT, UEA). Their different perspectives on Benjamin, from Philosophy and from Comparative Literature/Translation Studies respectively, initiated some very interesting questions in the subsequent discussion, looking across disciplinary boundaries to explore the impact of the essay. Participants were very engaged by both papers.

The ‘In Conversation’ session with Dr Chantal Wright (ZHAW) and Professor Douglas Robinson (CUHK, Shenzhen) was chaired by Dr Arianna Autieri and ranged from discussion of the text itself to a broader dialogue about the experience of translating Benjamin, or translating in the spirit of Benjamin. This was a very valuable opportunity for delegates to hear two international scholars in Translation Studies sharing their extensive expertise on the conference topic. We are grateful to all four keynote speakers for their willingness to adapt to challenging circumstances, and for their generosity and supportive reflections on papers throughout the conference.

The standard of papers and presentations was very high throughout the conference. Panel sessions centred on the following topics:

· Theoretical readings of Benjamin;

· Contemporary perspectives;

· ‘The task’ as a literary lens;

· Reading ‘the task’ through Benjamin and his translators.

Particular strands that emerged from the panel discussions included the materiality of language and text, translation as a performance, critical engagement with binaries such as un/translatability and the im/possible, and the importance of reading texts and theories in context.

The broad and engaged conversations that continued throughout the day meant that the conference objectives were easily met. Benjamin’s essay was read and reframed from a number of different angles, and the discussions that followed panels and keynotes provided ample opportunity to develop these ideas. There was a relaxed, engaged and supportive atmosphere throughout the day, for all papers. We were delighted to be able to welcome ten students from the Warwick MA in Translation and Cultures to the keynote sessions: these students have had a unique opportunity to be part of a landmark event at the start of their postgraduate careers in Translation Studies, and we were pleased that so many of them chose to attend.

Following prior contact with Routledge, we were able to secure a discount for conference delegates on Douglas Robinson and Chantal Wright’s publications on the Benjamin essay, valid for a month after the conference. We are grateful to Routledge for their generosity in this, and for sending us the sample copies.

Keynotes, presenters and attendees commented positively on their experience, describing it as stimulating, entertaining and enriching. One delegate commented: Congratulations … for putting on such a wonderful event under challenging circumstances and with several contingencies! It was of course a long day but the I felt the format really did encourage conversations, and all the talks were excellent. It was wonderful to have so many great scholars together and to have a chance to discuss. Thank you once again for all your efforts in organising.’

Our intention is to publish proceedings from the conference as a ‘Talking Points’ volume with the Forum for Modern Language Studies. This is a format that invites a dialogic, open format and a narrow focus and would work well as a publication of the ideas and conversations featured at the conference. We are in touch with delegates about this and are in the process of putting together a Call for Papers. In the longer term, the co-organisers also hope to apply for funding to support a future research project exploring literary afterlives and modernism.

The organising committee of the interdisciplinary conference ‘Locations of (Dis)embodied Labour in Theatre and Performance’ are happy to announce that registration is now open.

The conference will be held in the Wolfson Research Exchange on 30 November 2023. Registration is open until Thursday 16 November.

For registration and a preliminary conference programme, please visit https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/theatre/staff/yangzizhou/locationsoflabour2023/.

If you have any queries, please contact the conference organisers directly at disembodiedlabour@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

Conference Report: PhD & PeerNet Symposium

School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts Building  

20-22 September 2023

We are pleased to report that the PhDnet & PeerNet Symposium: European and Literary Studies was a great success. We had 27 participants, including postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior and senior researchers from seven different European countries, coming together at this symposium.

The two half- and one full-day conference hosted by the School of Modern Languages brought together for the first time in a combined event the members of the transnational PhD training programme, the PhDnet, and the newly established research network in European cultural and literary studies, the PeerNet. Both networks are based at the partner institutions, the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, the University of Graz, the University of Bergamo, the University of Helsinki, the Catholic University of Lisbon, Stockholm University, and the University of Warwick.* This conference was the kickoff event of this initiative and offered a great opportunity for institutional and cross-national exchange that will continue.

The symposium identified intersections between existing projects and developed common ground for collaborative work across the partner universities. Joint funding applications, specific concepts, theories and methodological approaches were discussed on the basis of papers, chapter drafts and project proposals. Individual projects presented in plenary in 10-minute slots on day one provided the participants with an overview of what is happening across the institutions. The second day was devoted to presenting pre-circulated papers, each of which was then commented on by a pre-selected respondent, followed by an open discussion with all panel participants. Two parallel sections ran on day one and two with balanced numbers of postgraduates, junior and experienced researchers in each section. The third day of the symposium was split into two groups again, this time offering a Masterclass to the PhDnet students on time management and productivity, while members of the PeerNet met to co-ordinate and discuss their collaborative research and current and prospective joint funding applications. It was great to have Sam Cole from Research & Impact Services offering this international audience information on the UK’s deal to associate with Horizon Europe, explaining what the deal implies and how it changes the current funding landscape.

The Masterclass was delivered by Warwick/Giessen Alumna of the PhDnet, Dr Anna Tabouratzidis, who also moderated a second event, the PhD/Postdoc/Alumni exchange, attended by members of the PhDnet and also offered to the SMLC and wider Faculty of Arts PGR and Postdoc community. This was a great opportunity for peer networking amongst postgraduates.

A keynote lecture entitled “Nightmares in the Library. Real and Imaginary Books in J.S. Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) and C.T. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932)” was given by SMLC colleague Fabio Camilletti in plenary but was also open to the SMLC community.

Since colleagues from our six partner universities were visiting the University of Warwick and the Midlands for the first time, we offered a guided City tour on the morning before the conference started and we took our guests on a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon on the last day, after the conference had ended. This visit included a visit at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the evening where we watched Macbeth. Participants expressed their excitement about this unique opportunity which further created a sense of community among these researchers, who had worked together intensively for three days.

On the academic side, participants discussed work in progress and reflected on aims, conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches and research foci with their international partners. The symposium fostered cross-cultural communication in European literary and cultural studies, and established new ideas for and standards in project development in this field. 

The intellectual exchange and discussions between peer researchers, but also between junior and senior researchers during the three days of the symposium, created a culture of inclusivity within and across the two networks and proved to be highly productive. PGRs in particular, familiarized themselves with a range of different national academic cultures and traditions while at the same time observing how these manyfold and oftentimes diverse approaches and perspectives complement, speak to and interact with each other, creating a dynamic research culture that implements new ways of thinking and establishes innovative pathways in research. With this outcome, the overall conference’s objective was not only met but exceeded.

The intellectual outcome of this symposium will not be documented in a single volume or any other form of immediate publication, but it has already resulted, and will further materialize, in joint grant applications.

This symposium was one of a series of symposia, workshops, and conferences to follow which will be hosted in alternating order at one of the partner institutions. Two thematic conferences are planned for autumn 2024 and 2026. The outcome of these will be published in the form of conference volumes for which we will consider Warwick’s Series in the Humanities with Routledge as a valuable option.

We would like to thank the Humanities Research Centre and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures for the generous support which made this very successful symposium possible. The event has helped to put research at Warwick on the European map and to foster a vibrant intellectual community and sustainable culture across institutions.

*About the PhDnet and the PeerNet

Members of the PhDnet: European and Literary Studies pursue their doctoral studies at their home institution and one of the six partner institutions, where their projects are jointly supervised. Moreover, they are awarded bi-national degrees. As a complement to the PhDnet postgraduate training programme, the PeerNet offers its members, including researchers at all stages of their career, a platform for innovative forms of research collaboration across cultures, intellectual exchange. Peer-to-peer support is offered in face-to-face interaction in a creative and inclusive atmosphere – as opposed to anonymous peer review or informal exchanges on social media. The mission of the PeerNet is to promote international standards of excellence in the study of literature and culture, to assist its members in developing cutting-edge interdisciplinary research projects, and to foster transnational collaboration among participating individuals and institutions.

Spiritualism and Italian Cultures XVIII-XX Centuries was an interdisciplinary conference organised by Bart Van den Bossche (KU Leuven), Fabio Camilletti (University of Warwick) and Gennaro Ambrosino (University of Warwick) in Leuven on 29-30 September.

The two-day conference examined the role and spread of Modern Spiritualism in Italian culture and literature since the second half of the 18th century. Modern Spiritualism and parapsychology, the discipline that seeks to explain supernatural events using scientific methods, originated in the United States in 1848 following the experiments of the Fox sisters. From the United States, spiritualism spread rapidly to Europe in the early 1850s, bringing with it the fashion for turning tables, invoking the spirits of the dead and communicating with them through mediumship. This phenomenon exerted a powerful influence on the European popular imagination, inspiring literary texts, occupying the pages of major periodicals and becoming the focus of scholarly debate.

Filling an important gap in the literature on occultism and (pseudo)science and their multiple interactions with Italian culture, the event provided an overview of the phenomenon, analysing it from different and complementary perspectives. While there is a great deal of studies on this subject in other European countries, there is no comprehensive contribution that examines the development and influence of this phenomenon in its entirety in Italy, with the exception of works dealing with the period between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century and Camilletti's Italia lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l'occulto (2018), which focuses on the 1960s. Italian Spiritualism acquired original and innovative patterns due to the political situation in which it spread, the cultural background of the peninsula and its close relationship with the Catholic Church, making it a unique case study to be studied.

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and fields (literary studies, art history, history of science and medicine), the conference deliberately covered a wide period, taking into account not only the post-unification period, which, as already mentioned, marks the explosion of this phenomenon up to the First World War, but also the study of the 'supernatural' before the advent of Spiritualism and the Spiritualist literature of the second half of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century.

The first day of the conference opened with Gennaro Ambrosino's analysis of the origins and spread of mesmerism in Italy between 1779 and 1853, focusing on the topoi and aspects that would later feed the Spiritualist rhetoric. Francesco Paolo De Ceglia (University of Bari "Aldo Moro") and Stefano Serafini (University of Padua) then analysed the Spiritualist movement in the second half of the 19th century. The former focused on the famous Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, describing her career and the cultural context in which she became famous. The latter focused instead on the literary fortunes of Spiritualism from the 1850s to the 1890s and the relationship between science and the occult in this period. After lunch, the conference continued with Fabio Camilletti's lecture, which shed light on the Spiritualist elements in the works of the writer Pitigrilli and described the rise of Spiritualism in the 1940s and 50s. Simona Micali (University of Siena) focused on three novels from three different periods (the 1940s, the 1960s and the 2010s), analysing the different declinations and models of Spiritualism in the three authors (Landolfi, Buzzati and Zanotti). Finally, Corinne Pontillo (University of Catania) analysed the motif of "ghosts" in the literary works of the writer Alberto Savinio, who lived in the first half of the 20th century.

The second day opened with Stefano Lazzarin's (Università Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne) analysis and close reading of Alberto Moravia's short story "Seduta Spiritica" (1960), which has often been neglected by scholars. Martina Piperno (Università di Roma "La Sapienza") proposed a necromantic reading of Ombre dal fondo by Maria Corti, looking at the relationship between philology and necromancy. The last two papers focused on the visual aspect of Spiritualism in Italian culture in the 21st century: Paola Cori (University of Birmingham) analysed the art installation of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, with particular attention to Breath Ghost Blind (2021), which shows the phantom-like atmosphere of his works; Chiara Zampieri (KU Leuven) dealt with the literary motif of "ghosts in museums" in contemporary literature.

Overall, Spiritualism and Italian Cultures XVIII-XX Centuries was well attended throughout the day, with many lively discussions in the various panels. From early nineteenth-century Mesmerism to the Neapolitan Spiritualist Circle, which included the world's most studied and famous medium, Eusapia Palladino, from Buzzati's writings to Maurizio Cattelan's art installations, the conference was a unique and collaborative opportunity to explore Spiritualism in Italian culture and its influence on the popular imagination. As a result, a proposal for an edited collection is being prepared.

There will be a launch event taking place on Wednesday 6th December from 12.00 - 14.00 in FAB2.25 - we recommend that all potential applicants attend - useful information - free lunch - meet Alison and Sue - ask questions.

Booking for this event is now open - Booking Form

Doctoral Fellowship Competition (warwick.ac.uk)