As parish researchers, some of us zoom in on specific communities, buildings or individuals, while others address more general themes, period structures or longer-term developments. Yet we all engage with various forms of ‘writing’ to obtain key information and then aspire to disseminate findings in the form of reports, essays, monographs, social media posts or online texts of our own. The twentieth anniversary symposium of the Warwick Network for Parish Research focuses on the opportunities, challenges and processes of ‘writing’ about parishes in the broadest sense of the term.

Writing the Parish (warwick.ac.uk)

The 17^th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture organised by the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies is on Tuesday 10^th May 17:00 to 19:00 BST.

To register, please click on the link below:

17th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture by David Palumbo-LiuLink opens in a new window

Dr Conor Trainor, University of Warwick (Chair: Prof Zahra Newby)

“Were the Romans good for the Economy? A View from Greece”

For any further information and a link to join the online seminar, please contact the organisers:

Lucrezia Sperindio: Lucrezia.Sperindio@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window

Jacqui Butler: J.Butler.4@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window

As part of our Summer Term programme of online research seminars in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (University of Warwick)Link opens in a new window, we are delighted to announce our forthcoming seminar who may be of interest for both colleagues and students:

• Dr Wine Tesseur (Belgian NGO Trias) on Wednesday 11 May 2022, 4-5pm (UK time): 'Translation as social justice: translation policies and practices in NGOsLink opens in a new window'

• The event takes place on MS Teams. We would kindly ask you to register in advance by completing the short registration formLink opens in a new window by Monday 9th May midnight (UK time). You will be provided with the relevant link Teams invite prior to the talk.

Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry)

Lieux oubliés et pas perdus: mapping the monuments of Paris that never were

This seminar will present new archival research at the collections and archives of the Musée Carnavalet, targeting documentation of monuments, memorials and museums that never came to be, for example the failed proposal to construct a memorial museum of the French Revolution at the 1889 centenary. The paper will explore the politics of the planning, commissioning and financing of a selection of the city’s monuments from the Revolution to the present, mapping an ephemeral network of lost and fading interactions with French history. The paper will discuss the historical planning of monuments, and the present development of cultural policies and politiques de mémoire. The evolution of the monumental landscape will be analysed to assess whether the development of these landmarks has become less elitist or simply inclusion-washed in new narratives that come with no concrete improvements for concerned communities. The work feeds into my new project ‘Mediating Memory through the Monuments of Paris’, which will address issues in accessibility and representation in monuments and memorials. The project will propose increased and improved cultural policies and practices surrounding the construction and maintenance of urban sites of collective memory.

To join the seminar on Teams click here.

Luca Rastello: writer

Speakers: Andrea Brondino (University of Warwick), Luca Chiurchiù (University of Macerata), Cecilia Ghidotti (Loughborough University in London) and Lorenzo Marchese (University of L’Aquila).

Dr Chiara Graf, University of Warwick (Chair: Xavier Buxton)

“Oedipus' Stumble: Fear and Stuckness in Seneca's Phoenissae”

For any further information please contact the organisers:

Lucrezia Sperindio: Lucrezia.Sperindio@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window

Jacqui Butler: J.Butler.4@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window

Dr. Michael Bycroft (Warwick), 'Gem Classification from Antiquity to the Renaissance'

Keynote Speaker: Dr Daniel Hartley (Durham University) 

Capital comes into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’, Marx observes in the first volume of Capital (1867), in his account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Responding to Marx, Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital (1913) theorises the actuality of an ongoing primitive accumulation, ransacking the colonies to solve the problem of underconsumption in the core. Marxist feminists engaged in the housework debates of the 1970s began to conceive of women’s unpaid labour as a continuous form of expropriation. In recent years, responding to neoliberalism’s wave of privatisations, David Harvey, Peter Linebaugh, Massimo De Angelis, and Nancy Fraser have placed the question of an ongoing primitive accumulation (or ‘accumulation by dispossession’) on the agenda once more. Jason Moore’s work on the capitalist appropriation of ‘cheap nature’ underscores the ecological stakes of such dispossessions, while Brenna Bhandar and Robert Nichols have sharpened our understanding of how ‘racial regimes of ownership’ and logics of dispossession functioned, historically, in the settler colony.

This symposium proposes to explore what cultural analysis can contribute to this rich re-examination of the history and theory of dispossession. Where has capitalist expropriation found expression in novels, poems, plays, films, and other cultural forms? Where has it not? How have such representations (or absences) been inflected by class, race, gender, and sexuality? More broadly, how might attention to capital’s ‘blood and dirt’—its dispossessions and extractions, enclosures and plantations—challenge or complement schools of Marxist cultural criticism centred on abstraction, reification, and ideology? How do cultural texts themselves help us totheorise the connections between capitalist abstraction and what Michael Denning calls ‘wageless life’? Might a renewed focus on such concepts open up Marxist theory to a more thoroughgoing exchange with world-systems theory, feminism, postcolonial theory, the environmental humanities, or other theoretical paradigms?

Dispossession, enclosure, extraction, plantation: such are the keywords that this symposium proposes to read through cultural form. We invite proposals that conceive of our keywords in a broad way (as material histories, social logics, or imagined futures) and explore their relationship to capital and culture, conceived equally broadly. Papers need not follow any particular ‘approach’ or methodology and might consider thematic, formal, theoretical, sociological, or historical elements of cultural production. We welcome proposals relating to any time period or geographical area, and we encourage submissions from graduate students,early career researchers, and affiliated and independent scholars.

The Future of the Lyric Encounter
Inaugural lecture. June 1, 2022, 5pm. FAB 5.01-03

Professor David Fearn

Register your attendance: David Fearn Inaugural Lecture (warwick.ac.uk)

This is a lecture about Greek lyric poetry. But what do we think this even is, and how should we frame this question? Moreover, how do we understand not simply what it is, but what it does, and might do, both now and in the future? What are the stakes of its persistence?

I briefly explore a range of ways in which thinking with ancient lyric texts alongside some strands of comparative literature, critical theory, and philosophy helps us to understand afresh and continue to articulate our commitments – now, and for the future – to these ancient, remote, shards of expression. I will illustrate my talk with excerpts of ancient lyric texts – taken from Pindar and Sappho – that seem alternatively to model, or challenge, our own absorption into their realms of experience.

What are the stakes of such absorption for our own self-understanding? And how best might we situate Greek lyric poetry within comparative spaces – beyond familiar scholarly frameworks of ancient politics or religion or social life - to continue to insist upon the nature of its challenges, and with what consequences? How, indeed, might such reflection help us to assess the challenges that make being a Classicist a matter of continuing controversy and fascination?

Nadia Kiwan (Aberdeen) and Jim Wolfreys (KCL)

Nadia Kiwan: Decolonial approaches to laïcité as a mode to re-think contemporary Islamophobia

Jim Wolfreys: The Macron presidency and the sanctification of Islamophobia

The Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies will be hosting Dr Kristin Mahoney of Michigan State University for a seminar today at 5pm in FAB2.31 on “Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family.”

She will be talking through her approach to her new book and discussing some key examples from across its chapters. There will be snacks and wine.

If you are unable to come in person, this will be a hybrid event.

You can find out more about Dr Mahoney’s book at:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/queer-kinship-after-wilde/B8E7C5A00A3771B7873C6FAE8C7B2D65

And about Dr Mahoney’s exciting research at: https://english.msu.edu/faculty/kristin-mahoney/

If you are unable to come in person, this will be a hybrid event. Please register on Eventbrite to attend via Teams:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dr-kristin-mahoney-msu-queer-kinship-after-wilde-tickets-348026445467

The department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, with assistance from the Humanities Research Centre, is thrilled to announce that Professor Clint Burnham of Simon Fraser University (SFU) will be leading a workshop, public lecture, and poetry reading on Monday, 13 June 2022 at the University of Warwick.

Alterstories from the soil – exploring ecological un/belongings

A one day hybrid symposium 15^th June 2022, 9.00-6.30pm at the University of Warwick - REGISTRATION IS FREE : LINKLink opens in a new window 

Soils have stories to tell about pasts, presents and futures in the making. The environmental crisis affecting soils today has led to a wave of appreciation of their materiality as living worlds and to calls to rethink human-soil relations as an ecological community of care. Yet soils also entail a material memory of troubled associations with un/belonging. Stories about human-soil attachments can evoke deep care for places, but also historical and current exploitation, exclusion, and dispossession from land and community. Encouraging re-imaginations of human-soil relations as ecological belongings, this gathering seeks to bring together the cares of un/belonging and ecological thinking through alterstories that may nurture alternative conceptions of more than human justice.

Confirmed speakers: Åsa Sonjasdotter, Lesley Green, Patricia Noxolo, Nirmal Puwar, Ros Gray, RL Martens, Adele Reed, Greg Muldoon

The one day symposium will be followed by a public talk by Malcom Ferdinand, author of Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, (Polity, 2022) followed by a response by Shela Sheikh

This symposium is organised by Maria Puig de la BellacasaLink opens in a new window and Giulia ChampionLink opens in a new window as part of the project Ecological Belongings: transforming soil cultures with science, art and activismLink opens in a new window funded with an AHRC Leadership Fellowship. It is hosted by CIM (Centre for Interdisciplinary MethodologiesLink opens in a new window, The University of Warwick) and organised in collaboration with the Warwick Environmental Humanities NetworkLink opens in a new window and the and the Warwick Environmental Systems Interdisciplinary CentreLink opens in a new window

REGISTRATION IS FREE BUT REQUIRED FOR PARTICIPATION - IN PERSON AND REMOTE: FOLLOW THIS LINKLink opens in a new window TO THE REGISTRATION PAGE

*A few TRAVEL BURSARIES are available for precarious or unfunded researchers willing to attend in person: please email directly maria.puig-de-la-bellacasa@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window *

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME (in progress): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/research/research-projects/ecological-belongings/symposium-programme/Link opens in a new window

School of Creative Arts Performances and Visual Cultures summer term research seminar. - Dr Emma Cox (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Interceptive Aesthetics: Performing #SolidarityAndResistance at Sea

In January 2022, approximately 70 forced migrants who had taken precarious refuge on Shell’s Miskar oil platform, situated off the coast of Tunisia and within a European search and rescue (SAR) zone, were handed to Tunisian authorities and returned. As one more iteration of the EU’s biopolitical regime of Mediterranean interdiction and quasi-legalised boat turn-back, the incident was normative, but on this occasion a subsidiary group of people who had been drifting in waters near the oil rig were rescued by the MV Louise Michel, owned by British street artist Banksy. The boat features a spray-paint motif and the word RESCUE in lurid pink, along with a repurposed image of Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’. The Louise Michel’s performative, publicised actions represent an explicit aestheticisation of rescue in a region where migrant trauma is already a mediatised spectacle. The Louise Michel’s first operation in 2020 attracted wide media coverage, but it had been held at port by authorities until 2022. The vessel is part of a European network of non-state rescue boats; despite the criminalisation of their work, these operations have increased substantially in recent years, entering a space of diminished EU response. Deploying the hashtags #SolidarityAndResistance and #AllBlackLivesMatter, NGO operations situate maritime rescue as affiliative, direct-action resistance to state power, contextualised by global anti-racism. This paper considers what kind of solidarity is enacted by NGOs like the Louise Michel and reflects on ways in which the interceptive aesthetics of their work might revise ideas about refugee-responsive performance as intervention.

Biographical Note

Emma Cox is Reader and Head of Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship (2015), Theatre & Migration (2014), and editor of the play collection Staging Asylum (2013). Cox’s writing has been published in journals such as Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (2020).

All attendees are welcome at a drinks reception following the lecture.

Benjamin Dalton (Birmingham)

Relaxing with Catherine Malabou: Approaches to letting go in philosophy and neuroscience

This paper will explore themes of relaxation, letting be, and letting go in the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Writing at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and other diverse disciplines, the concept at the core of Malabou’s work is that of plasticity: the ways in which the body and brain are ‘plastic’, and thus radically mutable and transformable. Malabou’s work is concerned with the question of how we might activate or embrace this plasticity for socio-political change and emancipation. One of responses to this ‘how’, I will argue, is to do precisely with modes of relaxation, letting be, and letting go that are more or less latent in Malabou’s elaboration of plasticity. These modes of relaxation and release are not to be confused with ideas of rest, R&R, stress-relief, wellness, etc.; rather, I argue, they invoke or induce a radical state of self-abandonment or self-shattering (of the body, brain, spirit) at play in Malabou’s accounts of profound transformation and metamorphosis. In his book La Soltura del cuerpo (2018), Cristóbal Durán analyses what he refers to as ‘la soltura’ in Malabou’s account of the plastic body and brain, which might translate from the Spanish as ‘ease’, ‘release’, ‘setting free’, but also ‘skill’. Durán here draws upon instances where Malabou describes plasticity through a lexis of release or letting go. Meanwhile, Malabou herself writes a preface to Anne Dufourmantelle’s Puissance de la douceur (2013), in which she praises the radical potentiality of Durfourmantelle’s concept of douceur, softness or gentleness. This gentleness, Malabou stresses, is not the kind of relaxation we find in neo-liberal approaches to meditation, mindfulness, yoga, etc., but an altogether more fundamental and radical instance of letting go. Bringing together these ideas from Malabou, Durán, and Dufourmantelle, I want to extend these theorisations of relaxation across three other interlocutors: the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (Cerveau et Méditation, 2017), who brings philosophy, meditation, and neuroscience together; the architects and philosophers Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who design built environments which relax and transform the body; and experimentations with psychedelics in the pursuit of neural and socio-political transformation in the movement known as ‘acid communism’. I ask: what technologies and practices (medical, architectural, spiritual, etc.) might induce the kinds of relaxation present in Malabou’s philosophy? What practical implications and potentials would these states have for the body and mind? And what forms of socio-political transformation might these states of relaxation bring about?

Benjamin's paper will be followed by a Response from Oliver Davis, Professor of French Studies, Warwick.

To join the seminar on Teams click here.

About the Event

WIRE is the newly formed Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Exchange.

It aims to bring together a range of researchers across the University, to explore and discover possibilities for future interdisciplinary collaborations.

Our contribution to solving the wicked problems of Climate Change and Sustainability starts by bringing together talented and open-minded researchers, who are daring enough to challenge the status quo of how we are addressing problems.

WIRE intends to be a catalyst to foster conversations between researchers keen to engage with each other across disciplines.

Addressing Climate Change and Sustainability challenges means moving ourselves out of the comfort zone of our disciplines and ways of thinking. It means getting us to think the unthinkable.

Participation is free. Places are limited so please register early to avoid disappointment.

Register Here

The University of Warwick is organising this one-day conference to discuss the global consequences of Russia’s War in Ukraine, for the sustainability of the planet. The ongoing war unleashed by Russia in February 2022 does not only have devastating consequences for Ukraine, but also has a significant impact on the rest of the world.

We are witnessing what the Germans have called - a Zeitenwende – a major historical turning point that will have profound implications on everything - on a planetary scale - from trade, production, supply and wealth, to security, war and the ability of the global international society to meet urgent challenges such as climate change, poverty, inequality and global health.

This one-day conference will address specific challenges of sustainability, with planetary consequences, on the following issues:

• Energy and food security in the context of Russia’s war: from cascading risks to global effects?
• Ruined cities and destroyed infrastructures: What are the consequences for global connectedness?
• The human dimension: What lessons for democratic sustainability?

Constellations of HOME, by the Agency Photography Group

3 - 27 October 2022

Constellations of HOME is a legacy project from Agency, part of the HOME: Arts and Homelessness Festival that took place 8–16 October 2021 during Coventry City of Culture.

Agency was created by the socially engaged artist Anthony Luvera in collaboration with people who have experienced homelessness in Coventry.

Constellations of HOME features Assisted Self-Portraits from Agency, alongside personal reflections and photographs from personal, professional and community networks chosen and co-curated by participants.

Constellations of HOME was created by the Agency Photography Group working with Anthony Luvera from Coventry University; Ben Davenport from Crisis Skylight; and Nadine Holdsworth and Jennifer Verson from the University of Warwick. It has been funded by the Warwick Institute of Engagement.

(joint seminar with Italian):

Prof Carlo Caruso (University of Siena).

Paper title: 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) - An Antique Novel for Modern Readers'

Teaching Languages

Speakers:

Nora MichaelisLink opens in a new window (German Studies)

Professor Tony LiddicoatLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window (Applied Linguistics)

Dr. Valentina AbbatelliLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window (Italian Studies)

Book launch: Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

Dr Cecilia Piantanida (SMLC Warwick) in conversation with Prof Carlo Caruso (Siena) and Dr Elena Giusti (Classics Warwick)

UN Urban October: Co-creating Regional Resilience 

• 09.00 – 14.00
• Scarman Conference Centre - Space 11

Enhancing regional resilience during a cost-of-living crisis necessitates open knowledge-sharing and innovative, transdisciplinary problem-solving between key regional stakeholders. Participants at this event will have the opportunity to: share and discuss contemporary practices and research initiatives related to co-creation; hear evidence-based examples and ideas for fostering grassroots collaboration; and network with regional stakeholders.

Aims of the event:

• Strengthen policy-making processes through broadened and deepened community engagement
• Engage with the latest research and share cross-sector best practice
• Explore opportunities for collaboration with partners across Coventry & Warwickshire

For the full programme and to book your place, visit: https://warwick.ac.uk/research/priorities/sustainable-cities/events/sustainable_cities_grp/

Wednesday 19th October: Shirley Jordan (Newcastle), 'Le Temps de vieillir: Martine Franck’s forgotten photobook'