Stonebreakers: Film Screening and Roundtable Discussion
Wednesday 13 March 2024 

HRC report – Joanne Lee

Internal webpage: Stonebreakers (warwick.ac.uk)
Coventry Cathedral webpage: Stonebreakers - Film Screening - Coventry Cathedral

On Wednesday 13^th March, Valerio Ciriaci (director) and Isaak J. Liptzin (producer) visited Warwick as part of their UK tour to present their documentary film Stonebreakers (Awen Films, 2022). Thanks to the generous support from the HRC Visting Speaker’s Fund and from the Warwick Institute of Engagement, along with contributions from departments of History, PAIS, SCAPVC and the SMLC, we were able to stage two separate events: an afternoon on-campus event open to staff and students, and an evening event in the Chapter House theatre of Coventry Cathedral open to members of the public.

Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak J. Liptzin co-founded Awen Films in 2012 and Stonebreakers is their third documentary feature film. The documentary chronicles the fight around historical memory in the US that exploded in 2020 during the George Floyd protests and the presidential election. It interrogates understandings of national narratives and foundational myths (in particular Columbus and the Founding Fathers) and explores debates around contested monuments, statues and landmarks. The film premiered in 2022 at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, where it won three awards.

The afternoon screening and roundtable panel discussion took place in the Cinema Room of the Faculty of Arts Building with an audience of around 40 staff and students and was followed by a drinks reception.In the evening, a similar free event took place in the Chapter House theatre of Coventry Cathedral with around 30 in attendance. Although scheduled on a busy day in the last week of term, the film drew in a varied audience with interests in US politics, racial justice, decolonising movements, historical memory and documentary filmmaking.

The film-screenings (70 minutes) were followed by a roundtable panel discussion – the aim of which was not only to allow the filmmakers to explain the ideas behind the making of the film and respond to questions from the audience, but also to bring them into dialogue with researchers and cultural activists who specialise in different aspects of US history and politics, questions of memory and memorialisation, and cultural policy and inclusion.

Afternoon panelists included:

Jess Eastland-Underwood: a final year PhD Student from PAIS whose research looks at how everyday understandings of the concept of ‘the economy’ in the USA mobilised the anti-lockdown and George Floyd protests during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her published work has looked at interpretations of the economic ideology of the Founding Fathers in the Tea Party movement as well as the way popular conceptions of ‘the market’ reproduce white supremacy.

Alison Cooley: Professor in Classics at Warwick, Deputy Head of Classics, and Director of the Humanities Research Centre. Her interest in contemporary debates surrounding statues and memorials stems from her research into the cultural and political aspects of the Roman world. She has a forthcoming chapter on the destruction of ancient monuments from Pharaonic Egypt to Imperial Rome: 'Control: The destruction of monuments', in D. Agri and S. Lewis (eds.) Cultural History of Media: Antiquity (Bloomsbury)

Lara Ratnaraja: an independent cultural consultant who specialises in diversity, innovation, leadership, collaboration and cultural policy within the cultural, the HE and digital sectors. She co-produces a series of cultural leadership programmes for people from diverse backgrounds linked to geographical place and also curates a digital Conference called Hello Culture. Her projects include working with the 8 Welsh National Arts Companies to develop a cultural framework for diversity co-designed with creative stakeholders and residents.Lara is on the board of Compton Verney and is Co-Chair of the Coventry Biennial. She is also on the UK Council for Creative UK and the Equality Monitoring Group for Arts Council Wales.

Evening panelists included:

David Wright: David teaches and writes about cultural policy and the creative industries in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Warwick. His recent work has concerned campaigns for statues and memorials to figures from twentieth-century popular culture. He is currently writing a book for Liverpool University Press: Celebrity and Public Art: Memorialising Popular Culture and his recent open access article in the European Journal of Cultural Studies concerned nostalgia and statues to comedians in the North of England.

Ras Emmanuelle Henry Cottrell: founder of I&I Collective – an international collective of promoters, producers, performers, DJs, artists & activists. One of his recent projects at St Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry involved exploring the history of the American civil rights activist Frederick Douglass who visited the city in 1847 where he delivered three lectures as part of his anti-slavery campaigns.

Lydia Plath: Associate Professor of US History at Warwick, where she specialises in the history of racism and racial violence. Her research projects have investigated the representation of slavery in twentieth and twenty-first century American cinema. Her teaching centres on African American history and her module ‘America in Black and White’ won the inaugural Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Inclusive Curricula Prize. Lydia is one of the facilitators of the Tackling Racial Inequality at Warwick Staff Development Programme.

Both afternoon and evening screenings led to lively and insightful panel discussions in which participants debated the quest for representation within the film: was the struggle really about whether a statue or monument should stand, or was the struggle for territorial rights and political space more important? Why do certain stories become central to the national narrative while other stories and voices are marginalised? How can we incorporate activism into our teaching and research? Questions to the director and producer also explored cinematography and considered how much of the intensity and beauty of the film derives from the choice to avoid a didactic voice-over, the use of music to build tension and the powerful juxtaposition of imagery. At both events, we really needed an extra hour to fully explore these aspects!

The events were successful in bringing filmmakers together with researchers at Warwick and external collaborators while the subject of racial justice and political representation clearly resonated with both audiences. We hope to purchase the documentary for the library so that other members of the university can watch a film which makes a vital contribution to political debates about monuments, memorialisation and constructions of national narratives. We extend our thanks and appreciation to Valerio and Isaak for coming to Warwick and sharing their film with us – we eagerly await their next film project!

Divine Disasters: Exploring Distressed Landscapes in Literature and Theology

Conference Report

What happens when belief, the sacred and the divine collide with ecological crises? How do such distressed landscapes alter our ideas of the ecological and theological? The one-day interdisciplinary conference, Divine Disasters: Exploring Distressed Landscapes in Literature and Theology, set out to explore these questions at the University of Warwick on 24th February 2024.

This conference asked how art and literature depicted the role of the divine in disasters. During times of ecological crisis, some turn to religion for solace, while others feel their faith shaken. These dilemmas are unsurprising as the distressed landscapes of disasters are often places of multitudinous emotions, including fear, sadness, anxiety, anger, and hope, foregrounding theological queries of evil, doubt, and suffering. Literature and creative art often act as a site for exploring intersections between theological enquiries and ecological disasters. “Divine disasters” offers a new lens for examining the interrelationship between theology, ecology, and literature, questioning human vulnerability and theology’s big questions within narratives of distressed landscapes.

The conference welcomed 77 delegates, with 43 in-person attendees and a further 35 joining us online. The hybrid conference format made the event more accessible, facilitating a range of scholars from international institutions that enhanced the cross-discipline implications of Divine Disasters. In turn, the conference programme boasted presentations across diverse fields, including cultural studies, history, sociology, film, and media studies, to explore the conference theme in both imaged landscapes and real-world terms. 

Sadly, our keynote speaker, Prof. Patricia Murrieta-Flores, could not present her research on “Nepantla, between indigenous time and colonial space: Reflections about the end of the world in Central Mexico” due to illness. However, this schedule change allowed all delegates to participate in the two workshops initially planned to run concurrently. “Workshop A: Reading Ecopoetics in Divine Disasters”, facilitated by PhD candidates Ambika Raja, Nicola Hamer, and Lizzie Smith, opened the conference and invited discussions on poetry by Will Giles alongside visual art by Kaili Chun and Hongtao Zhou. In the afternoon, Catherine Greenwood from the University of Sheffield facilitated “Workshop B: Creating Responses to Divine Disasters” with Ruth-Anne Walbank, allowing delegates to write their responses to the conference theme through a series of free writing exercises and prompts from writing, including Catherine’s poetry, the Sura Qari’ah, and the Hopi Prophecies. While unexpected, the renewed focus on these interactive workshops rather than a single keynote decentred the conference’s didactic mode to refocus the event around discourse, exchange, and creativity, building a stronger feeling of academic community across the day.

The remainder of the conference encompassed six parallel panels from 17 researchers. In Room A, panels explored fictional representations of divine disasters, including ‘Dark Ecologies and Gothic Disasters’, ‘Deluge, Disaster, and Divine Deep Ecologies’, and ‘Remembering Disaster in Art and Culture’. The interdisciplinary scope of such fictional accounts enabled fresh comparisons between the mediums for imagining divine disasters, ranging from children’s animated films to Shakespeare’s plays. Meanwhile, the panels in Room B contemplated narratives from real-world disasters and the philosophical questions they raised, such as ‘Hope and Morality in the Face of Disaster’, ‘Divine Disasters and Religious Practice’, and ‘Extractions, Wastelands, and Human-made Disasters’. Papers on recent events such as the Chornobyl disaster and current topics like climate anxiety emphasised the relevance of “Divine Disasters” as an important critical lens for interpreting historic and contemporary distressed landscapes.

We would like to thank the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick for their support in funding the conference. Thanks to the high-quality papers from the 2024 conference, we hope to submit a book proposal to the Warwick Series in the Humanities to develop and share ‘Divine Disasters’ with wider academic communities.

Report by Ruth-Anne Walbank and Ambika Raja

March 2024

The Humanities Research Centre will fund 3 internal fellowships for PhD students and early career scholars (up to 5 years post PhD) wanting to conduct short periods of research abroad. The JHU and Newberry Fellowships are worth £3,000 each. The HRC North America/Europe Fellowship is worth £2,000. These fellowships are intended to support trips of 2-3 weeks that will deepen and broaden research links between Warwick and research institutions in North America and Europe and to further individual research projects in archives and collections. Applicants are responsible for arranging travel, visas, itineraries and accommodation, although we can provide advice. We encourage applicants to seek out contacts in the institutions they want to visit in advance of their applications and to provide details of these in their material (you do not need to provide written references). Your trip must be more than simply presenting a paper at a conference and you must clearly demonstrate the potential benefits to Warwick in your application.

Friday 17th May 2024, University of Warwick, The Oculus Building, room OC0.01

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck, University of London)Link opens in a new window

Dr Gianmarco Mancosu (School of Advanced Study, University of LondonLink opens in a new window

Workshop Report: ‘Approaches to Teaching the #EarlyModernHispanicWorld to 21st-Century Students’

How do we continue to engage students with the early modern and pre-modern Hispanic world in innovative ways? How can we make these texts more accessible to today’s learners whilst also retaining the essential differences of another culture and another era? These are some of the questions that scholars, in collaboration with students, explored during the interdisciplinary workshop ‘Approaches to Teaching the #EarlyModernHispanicWorld to 21st-Century Students’, which took place at Warwick on Friday, 13^th October 2023. The aim of the event was to rethink approaches and pedagogical methods to open up these texts and topics to higher education students and it included short presentations on all aspects of pedagogy and strategies for teaching, learning, and assessment that encourage learners to engage with key works using a variety of means, including visual and digital media. The hybrid format facilitated the attendance of scholars and PG students; overall, we had colleagues joining us in person and online from British, Irish and US institutions.

The first panel, entitled ‘Teaching Early Modern Literature’, included very engaging presentations by Prof. Isabel Torres (Queen’s University Belfast), Dr Anne Holloway (Queen’s University Belfast), and Dr Idoya Puig (Manchester Metropolitan University). They all offered some reflections on their experience facilitating effective engagement with literature from an era which is at a double remove from the twenty-first century student. Professor Torres focused on the rationale for learning and evaluation strategies which followed Egan’s ‘Imaginative Approach to Teaching’ (2005) and recent work on the concept of ‘Salience’ in Shakespearean Studies (Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh, 2023). She concluded by showing her students’ ‘creative response’ project work for the poetry module and reflections on ‘embodiment activities’ that will be further developed on the theatre course. Similarly, Dr Holloway showed the audience the potential in foregrounding the continuing resonances of the Early Modern within the Modern, and in anchoring literature within more familiar or immediate contexts for students. This was then clearly illustrated in the innovative assessment options that allow students to become editors, curators, or producers of podcasts or documentaries. In the last presentation of this panel, Dr Puig showed how we can make use of new media literacies in the university context to rediscover and renew Spanish Golden Age literary texts. By focusing on Cervantes’s La española inglesa, Puig demonstrated how literature, particularly classic texts, can be embedded in the language classroom in innovative ways.

During our second panel, we learned about the teaching of history of science and medicine in colonial Latin America thanks to Dr Yarí Pérez Marín (Durham University) and Dr Fiona Clark (Queen’s University Belfast). Dr Pérez Marín shared some examples from her teaching practice on how to facilitate student engagement with early modern sources on natural history and medicine at different levels, from ideas best suited for introductory undergraduate modules to more specialised postgraduate contexts. For instance, the opportunities her students have to collaborate and put into practice their knowledge at the Spanish Gallery at Bishop Auckland. Similarly, Dr Clark discussed some approaches to engage students with 18th-century topics by centring assessment in career-related contexts (taking examples from the Gazeta de Literatura de México, treatments for syphilis, art and health, and polemics around uses of chocolate). In addition to developing an understanding of primary sources, the underpinning aim of these modules is to help students develop more advanced writing and communication skills with an awareness of a specific audience and using digital technologies e.g., podcasting, digital editing, and working with interactive images.

The keynote presentation was delivered by Tara Munroe, Creative Director of Opal22 Arts and Edutainment, a historical researcher and museum curator who has been working within a number of museums and community organisations across the Midlands area in England over a number of years. Her work with Arts, Heritage and Cultural projects for the local communities has been nationally acclaimed and is being used as templates across the country. She brings a modern innovative twist to the heritage area and makes it fun for those she targets. Her presentation ‘Casta Paintings through 21st-Century Eyes’ was highly engaging and refreshing, particularly her work with local communities through workshops and events. Tara Munroe talked about her new exhibition, Casta: The Origin of Caste - which we totally recommend!-, which showcases a series of rare, historically important 18^th-century Mexican paintings she discovered in the basement of the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The paintings are explored by different experts who brought a range of approaches to reading the images, focusing primarily on issues of race. Her talk led us to consider the legacy, role, and questions around how to decode and decolonise art within the context of issues we confront in the 21^st century.

The last panel brought together different colleagues from Warwick that teach the early modern Hispanic world in three different departments: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, History and Liberal Arts. Prof. Rebecca Earle, based in the department of History and also an expert on Casta painting, explained how the history of food is an effective vehicle for exploring the past, particularly in her own experience of teaching Latin American history through food, and how this experience has in turn shaped her own research trajectory. Dr Liz Chant, based in Liberal Arts, explored how historical maps offer unique insights into the early modern Hispanic world, particularly to engage with issues of environmental history, historical geography and the history of science in the Spanish Empire. And finally, Dr Rich Rabone and Dr Leticia Villamediana González (SMLC) shared some pedagogical reflections on their collaborative teaching of ‘Knowing Women: Gender, Education, and Power’, in which students analyse strategies for engagement with or subversion of prevailing gender norms in the cultural production of two different periods: the Baroque, and the Enlightenment.

The workshop concluded with a roundtable that brought together in conversation scholars from different disciplines as well as some UG and PGR students. Some of the questions discussed were: What first attracted you to the study of early modern culture and literature? Out of the workshop sessions, have you found any new approaches to texts that you can see fitting well with their own work? For those ECRs / PGRs whose work sits between subjects like History and Languages, do they see any particular challenges? What do you see as being the greatest barriers to drawing new students into these subject areas? How important the canon should be when you design a curriculum?

Our main purpose when we first started thinking about this workshop was to initiate interdisciplinary conversations that might help participants to develop their own teaching practice. We think we achieved our goal; we were extremely pleased and impressed by the quality of the presentations, as well as the lively conversations and networking that took place during the coffee and lunch breaks. But just in case we are a bit biased, these are some of the comments of those who attended the event:

‘I was really interested to hear about the use of creative writing in assessment, especially approaches to assessing commentary on the creative piece rather than the piece itself. it was a really useful and fruitful exchange that has given me lots of new ideas for my teaching.’

‘It was wonderful to have an opportunity to be among like-minded colleagues reflecting on teaching. We need to acknowledge that the context in which these texts are received is always shifting and our approaches need to shift accordingly.’

‘Opportunity to share practice underlines the importance of creating a space for reflection on why we do what we do, and how, in our teaching and how we might develop our own practices; very positive and uplifting!’

‘After the presentations I thought on how to guide mi classes towards a more democratised learning, and importantly by establishing an affective connection that would help the co-creation of the curriculum and the educational materials.’

‘I was very interested in the transdisciplinary approach, and the experiences shared certainly gave me clear ideas on how to plan creative assessments in my art historical teaching. I am really happy for having attended to the workshop which generated such rich discussions and collegiality.’

‘It was very helpful to see specific examples of how to engage students with different media to read some texts and produce videos, commentaries, artefacts, etc. with their own interpretations. The concept of salience was very helpful to approach works from early periods of history.’

Finally, we are extremely thankful to those who generously funded the event and made it possible: the Humanities Research Centre at Warwick, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Connecting Cultures Group at Warwick and the University Council for Languages.

Dr Leticia Villamediana González

Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies

School of Modern Languages and Cultures