We have created a PGR forum for all Arts PGRs. It is mainly a resource forum designed so you can add your own useful links. We would love you to join us. Request access here.

We are pleased to announce a new monthly blog which will feature a variety of subject matter related to material culture from the ancient world. It aims to highlight and showcase some aspects of research work done in the Department of Classics and Ancient History and bring these to a wider audience. We hope that you will find the posts interesting, informative and enjoyable!

Melvyn Bragg and guests, including our very own Prof Paulo de Medeiros, discuss the works and life of one of Portugal's greatest poets - Fernando Pessoa.

See here for full details.

Issue 9 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has been published including written articles, audio-visual essays and a the first in a new series of student essays. This issue has been coordinated by Alex Clayton and Kathrina Glitre, and designed by Elizabeth Johnston.

Julia Peetz is editing an issue of Performance Research 'On Protest' with former Head of Department, Prof. Andy Lavender. Their call for papers is out and can be found below:

Storming the Capitol. Dismantling Confederate and slave trader statues. Refusing to wear a mask. Booing Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Sabotaging 5G towers. Buying stamps in an attempt to prop up the United States Postal Service. Defying lèse-majesté laws to criticize Thai royalty. Writing ‘Black Lives Matter’ on roads, so large that the message can be read from Earth orbit. All these actions have been performed as protests in 2020 and 2021, marking this as a year of significant dissent. In the United States alone, the Black Lives Matter actions may be the largest protest movement in the country’s history, eclipsing even the protests of the civil rights era. The US presidential election, meanwhile, was a site for trenchant protests that dramatize the situation of commitment-amid-division that protest typically represents—and that beg wider questions of protest as a contemporary mode of political insistence.

While many of the recent protests around the world mark a resurgence of the popular voice, the language of resistance and opposition has become ubiquitous on the political right as well as for progressives. Right-wing populists paint themselves as perennial outsiders, embattled by and protesting against deep state powers and global cabals. Protestors have weaponized ideals of personal freedom to rage

against COVID-19-specific health guidance regarding the wearing of face coverings in public. Social media are increasingly sites of and means of coordinating protest actions; even so, social media posts framed as protest actions are frequently denounced as merely ‘performative’ forms of protest and allyship. Debates on the correct and most effective manner of performing protest abound, and once-controversial civil rights heroes are invoked as exemplars of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to protest. Protest has mainstreamed, and it has become more volatile. It belongs not to any single faction or persuasion but has become pervasive—even while it is fostered as part of the repertoire of political sway, a system-theatre of power.

This issue calls for critical examinations of contemporary performances of protest across the globe. It is interested in ways that protest can be understood as theatre, but more particularly—in a multimodal, interconnected environment—as a form of public manifestation that draws upon a wide repertoire of representational devices. It seeks to address the relationship between embodied action, affective presence, communication and ideological affiliation. How does protest feel, and who is doing the feeling? It considers the performativity of protest. It pays particular regard to the extent to which protest achieves change (however this is defined) and the ways in which historical protests help to inform judgements of the conduct, legitimacy and efficacy of current protest actions. What historical instances are invoked to draw comparisons to current forms of activism and resistance? How do contemporary protests draw on historical repertoires of protest that reflect or extend beyond their specific political contexts? Do protest strategies and tactics need to evolve as languages of protest become a default mode of mainstream political discourse? Our concern with the modal nature of protest, we suggest, might also be historicized. What is it about our times, our modes of communication, our political systems, that help to produce protest as a defining feature of contemporary political process?

We invite contributions in the form of longer essays (up to 7,000 words), shorter provocations (2,000 words) and artist pages. We also welcome suggestions for unique or hybrid formats.

Contributors may wish to draw on the following list of topics as a source of inspiration, although the list is not intended to be exhaustive or restrictive.

• Staging/Representation of protest in mainstream media
• Contemporary theatres of protest
• Violent and non-violent protest
• Criteria for the efficacy of protest
• The triviality and ubiquity of protest
• Populism and protest
• Protest and the political right
• Protest and the political left
• The protestor as actor
• The affective nature of protest
• Protests and conspiracy theories
• Hyperbole and protest
• Social media and the performance of protest
• Performative protest/Performativity of protest
• Collective/Cultural memory of protest
• Protest and national identity
• Heroes of past/present protests (and their representation)
• Protest in the social sciences versus protest in the humanities
• Protest and change
• The purpose of protest (thinking of performance

Schedule:

Proposals 8th March 2021

First Drafts July 2021

Final Drafts September 2021

Publication Jan/Feb 2022

ALL proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to the PR office: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:

Andy Lavender (andy.lavender@gsmd.ac.uk )

Julia Peetz (julia.peetz@warwick.ac.uk )

General Guidelines for Submissions:

• Before submitting a proposal we encourage you to visit our website (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal.
• Proposals will be accepted by e-mail (MS-Word or RTF). Proposals should not exceed one A4 side.
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
• Submission of images and visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5MB, and there is a maximum of five images.
• Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.

Oliver Davis has published a new article on the work of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, as part of a special issue of Angelaki on Sloterdijk, edited by Patrick Roney and Andrea Rossi. 'Anthropotechnical Practising in the Foam-World' can be accessed here. Abstract: I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of Sloterdijk’s account of originary spheric being-with in the trilogy, focused on its culmination in the foam-world; I suggest this account is too ambiguous on key matters of basic ontological structure and I question whether the foam metaphor is adequate as a description of intersubjectivity today. Against the backdrop of this discussion I consider whether the general ascetology of Sloterdijk’s second anthropotechnics involves practising in, or practising on, the shells of symbolic immunity and conclude the latter. Setting this alongside the trilogy’s insistence that cells in the foam are “co-fragile,” I argue that anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world is suffused with a violence which Sloterdijk is reluctant to theorize. Registering one significant undeclared context of his discussion of self-enhancement, in postmodern management theory, I suggest that successful anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world requires the capacity to ignore other people and their interests. I note that Sloterdijk’s one-eyed embrace of competitive self-enhancement in You Must Change Your Life has since been qualified in brief remarks in What Happened in the 20th Century? [2016] but not substantively reconsidered. In conclusion, I pay tribute to the anthropotechnical lesson of Sloterdijk’s theoretical project, notwithstanding its design flaws and continuity errors.

We are excited to be opening our doors for the first time to postgraduate students as we launch our new MASc in Global Sustainable Development and MPhil/PhD in Global Sustainable Development.

The online launch of The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond: New Directions in Criticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) will be taking place next week. The editor, Dr Bryan Brazeau, Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts, will present the volume in conversation with Professor Simon Gilson (Oxford) on Wednesday 27 January at 5pm. The event will take place via Teams.

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ceim/ahie_prov_prog_18.01.21.pdf

We are very excited to reveal the programme for the At Home in Empire conference, to be held on 13th March 2021. You can register to attend this one-day interdisciplinary conference HERE. We were overwhelmed by the number of fascinating responses to our Call for Papers and deciding on the final programme was one of the most difficult tasks of conference-planning to date. The panels, which vary across different spaces and periods, cover a range of topics related to the home, intimacy, and mobility, and we hope to see as many people as possible in March to hear these fascinating papers.

The Midlands4Cities PhD scholarship competition for 2021 is now open.

The Brill Companion to Death, Burial and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c.1300-1700, edited by Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle, published in December, includes an essay by Stephen Bates, an Honorary Fellow of the Centre, entitled 'Preparations for a Christian Death: The Later Middle Ages'. The chapter argues that the turn to the macabre was the product of a pastoral impulse to encourage parishioners to accept that preparing for a good Christian death involved a lifelong preoccupation with re-ordering one’s moral priorities and that, although in practice they might induce fear, in design they were intended to be practical and reassuring, and to orientate layfolk around the geography of the afterlife.

They welcome panel proposals from Eighteenth-century Centres throughout the UK and seek to encourage penal proposals involving postgraduates, research fellows and senior faculty members. The deadline to receive proposals is November 30. If you have an idea for a panel theme, please feel free to get in touch with me so that we can coordinate our proposals. For information about BSECS and the conference, please click here.

Between 1594 and 1602, Carletti circumnavigated the world, traveling and trading in West Africa, the Spanish Americas, the Philippines, Japan, China, briefly stopping in Malacca and Ceylon before arriving in Portuguese India on his way back to Europe. Captured by the Dutch off St. Helena, he found his goods confiscated and litigated until 1605 for their return before traveling through France to reach Tuscany in 1606. The account of his journey forms the focus of this online workshop series, entitled “Carletti’s World: An Early Modern Global Voyage” held on Fridays from February to June 2021, at 9-11am PST / 12-2pm EST/ 5-7pm GMT / 6-8pm CET / 2-4am JST:

Sound of Care roundtable Sunday 24 January 6 pm CET Naomi Waltham-Smith is speaking at a roundtable on Sound of Care with participants including Bernie Krause, Holger Schulze, and Leah Barclay as part of the #LearningPlanet Festival 2021 organised in partnership with UNESCO.