Dear Colleagues,

I want to let you know that Diana Stonefield, Faculty of Arts Director of Administration, will be retiring and leaving the University at the end of September 2024. Her last working day will be September 17th.

I know everyone will want to join me in offering Diana our heartfelt thanks for all of the incredible work she has done since she arrived at Warwick in 2016. Diana worked closely with Professor Penny Roberts, our previous Vice-Provost and Chair of Faculty, to bring the FAB project to successful completion and was instrumental in the mammoth task of bringing us into the building. She was also central to bringing the Arts community through the Covid pandemic and other challenges we have encountered over the last few years.

She has been an amazing support to me as I’ve come into this role and I shall miss her collegiality, pragmatic counsel and good humour very much. Please do join me in wishing her the happiest of retirements and sending her our fondest thoughts for the next phase!

With best wishes,

Rachel

Professor Rachel Moseley

Vice Provost and Chair, Faculty of Arts

Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick are delighted to be partnering with the Pod on a new collaborative research project: ‘Using Film to Affect Change: Mental Health, Social Advocacy and the Moving Image’.

July's article on the Material Musings blog is by Chris Parr, who discusses the origins of the Lacus Curtius in the Forum Romanum: 'Reinventing Rome's Forgotten Past - the lost significance of the Lacus Curtius'. You can read it here.

Many congratulations to all who have been recognised for their teaching via the recent WATE Awards.

Nancy Haijing Jiang and Michael Meeuwis were both short-listed and in the postgraduate group, Owain Burrell and Andy Irwin received a Commendation, and Elizabeth Sharrock was declared a winner.

WATE Postgraduates who teach

The department is very sad to learn of the death of Prof. Trevor Burnard.

Therese Martin (Medieval Studies, Instituto de Historia, CCHS, Madrid) The art of rulership, or material evidence for reigning women: Subh of Córdoba (d. 998/999) and Urraca of León-Castile (d. 1126)

Please note: Seminars are in person only. Everyone welcome. The seminar will be followed by drinks.

Dr Rachel Turner-King (Education Studies) and Dr Bobby Smith co-edited the latest issue of Research in Drama Education - ‘Confronting the Global Climate Crisis: Responsibility, Agency and Action’. In this issue, authors grapple with the challenges of utilising applied theatre and socially engaged performance to explore climate crisis in a range of community contexts across the world. The issue is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crde20/current

On 2 July 2024 the GSD department held its third Annual GSD PhD Symposium - an event made possible by the Leverhulme Trust - sponsors of our Leverhulme-TRANSFORM Doctoral Training programme.

Read more. 

Louise is a former Warwick Liberal Arts student currently pursuing a PhD at Harvard University in the USA. She shares some of her undergraduate study experiences and how the Liberal Arts programme at Warwick contributed to her continued success in academia.

Read more.

Annual Report 2023/24

CMPS is delighted to be welcoming Dr. Colin Sterling from the University of Amsterdam to give our Annual Lecture this year, Ecologisation is not a metaphor: Culture in the Web of Life, on Weds 19th June at 5pm in the FAB Cinema, followed by a wine reception. You're welcome to join us. Please register here

The event also forms part of our PGR conference Being Human in the Media and Creative Industries taking place throughout the day.

We are delighted to share the news regarding our past PhD student, and current honorary fellow Dr Gloria Moorman, who has received a Mellon Foundation Fellowship Award in recognition of “outstanding scholarly potential" to support her project 'Catacombs, Sacred Archaeology and the Early Printed Book: The Global Ownership of Discovery (c. 1578-1700)'.
This award will allow Gloria to start work on the project at the Newberry Library in Chicago from January-end of May 2025. Many congratulations, it will be a wonderful experience I'm sure, and we are all very proud of you!
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/centrestaff/moorman/

The conference addresses the material, literary and visual culture associated with ‘corruption’ (broadly conceived). Relatively little attention has been paid to these dimensions of corrupt practices: to the gifts given as bribes, to the various material, artistic and cultural forms of public displays of corrupt wealth, and to the literary and visual representations of corruption. Nor has there been much debate about how to curate material bought or created with ‘corrupt’ money and how explain it to modern audiences.

Many congratulations to Sara Akhavan-Malayeri, the Maxine Berg Prize winner of 2024! Her dissertation entitles "The Fight over the Five ‘Soviet-born Wives of British Subjects’: the Impact of Anglo-Soviet Marriages in Early Cold War Britain”.

A new paper from CIM member Carlos Cámara-Menoyo along with Joanna Suchomska, Wojciech Goszczyński, Pia Laborgne, Andrea Pierce, Michał Wróblewski, João Porto de Albuquerque and Simon Jirka has just been published in Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement. The paper expands on the work made at Creating Interfaces project and complements the previous paper published in Environmental Science and Policy by focussing on the lessons learnt on food procurement through the implementation of an Urban Living Lab methodology.

Abstract:

This article presents a case study on the experimental co-creation process of a digital platform supporting Sustainable Public Food Procurement (SPFP) in public kindergartens in a medium-sized city in Poland. The organisation of SPFP requires a dedicated technological infrastructure to ensure the information flow among food producers, kindergarten employees, children and parents. To this end, a digital platform was designed to enable contact, assessment of food quality and food procurement environmental impact, and the communication of needs and problems among all the actors involved in the food procurement system for kindergartens. The article also discusses the results of the field research and the method of Urban Living Labs, highlighting the key challenges faced by those seeking to combine knowledge about food and the natural environment with public food procurement. The principal difficulties include the availability, accessibility and possible application of data on the environmental costs of food production, the individualisation of needs and motivations related to public catering in educational facilities, and the specific nature of the public sector responsible for public food procurement.