The Study Café is both a virtual and in-person programme delivered by the Arts Faculty. The programme aims to provides a space where students can write, read and work on their assessments in a supportive working environment. When in-person, we also provide access to technology such as laptops and provide both refreshments and lunch throughout the day.

This talk focuses on the world of empires that shaped the administration and experiences of Jewish refugees through the twentieth century. It adopts the perspectives of two groups of people “Other-ed” in the racial hierarchy of empire. First, it highlights the ways in which Jewish refugees responded to and participated in their changing categorizations prior to and following the start of the Second World War. Thinking from the perspective of women and children, it brings forward the different stakes for different groups of refugees in the categorizations they could not change. Second, it reads government records against the grain to put forward the perspective of Indians encountering these new “Europeans.” In doing so, I show that scholars ought to account for an expanded conception of Britain which includes in its “domestic” sphere its imperial boundaries when analyzing refugee movements in the Empire. This allows us not only to ask new questions on the Holocaust but also, of the archives that allow us to study them and the perspectives they represent.

This event is in cooperation with Feminist History Group and the proposed Centre for Global Jewish Studies

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Pragya Kaul is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History and a Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Y. Gitelman Fellow at Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. From 2020-2021, she was a Leo Baeck International Dissertation Fellow.

“Close-up portrait of Jewish refugee, Esther Weeg, wearing a sari while living in India.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives, Photograph Number: 77107, copyright of USHMM.

Speaker: Xavier Buxton, University of Warwick

Chair: Prof David Fearn

“A place where fear is good: ecopsychology in Classical Athens”

Carmela Pierini (Universita' Sacro Cuore - Milano)

Franziska Müller (Warwick/Gießen): presentation of aspects of PhD project

Queer subjectivity is often thought of as fluid, nonlinear. Such a viewpoint suggests a plurality of subjectivity for protagonists that, I argue, aligns with recent scholarship on retranslation theory which views this process as a complex intersection of possible meanings for a text. I suggest however that retranslation reinforces queer subjectivity because both avoid teleological outcomes of their processes. Retranslation thus becomes a possible locus of the enunciation of subjectivity in the original text. Drawing on a retranslation of Guillaume Dustan’s Dans ma chambre, I argue that this process affords reader the opportunity to reexamine how Dustan intended to illustrate his existence in relation to his disease. Far from 'foreignizing' the text more as Berman (1990) purports, this exercise amplifies the author’s discursive traits which highlight queer HIV praxis of the mid-90s. The book is canonical to French HIV/AIDS literature and additionally to autofictional subjectivity, that is to say how the author defines his existence in relationship to his disease. This essay compares the 1998 Serpent’s Trail edition of In My Room to the 2021 Semiotext(e) edition by unpacking how retranslation affords a new opportunity to augment the author’s simultaneous relationship to his disease and his existence apart from it. In lieu of viewing retranslation as an exercise that highlights the inadequacies of first translations, I will highlight how queer subjectivity finds renewal and strength in the retranslation process.

Daniel Nabil Maroun teaches translation theory and practice at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is largely committed to the representation of HIV/AIDS in French cultural productions, in particular contemporary representations in cinema and literature.

To join the seminar on Teams click here.

Daniel Nabil Maroun (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Subjectivity and Seropositivity: Retranslating Guillaume Dustan

Queer subjectivity is often thought of as fluid, nonlinear. Such a viewpoint suggests a plurality of subjectivity for protagonists that, I argue, aligns with recent scholarship on retranslation theory which views this process as a complex intersection of possible meanings for a text. I suggest however that retranslation reinforces queer subjectivity because both avoid teleological outcomes of their processes. Retranslation thus becomes a possible locus of the enunciation of subjectivity in the original text. Drawing on a retranslation of Guillaume Dustan’s Dans ma chambre, I argue that this process affords reader the opportunity to reexamine how Dustan intended to illustrate his existence in relation to his disease. Far from 'foreignizing' the text more as Berman (1990) purports, this exercise amplifies the author’s discursive traits which highlight queer HIV praxis of the mid-90s. The book is canonical to French HIV/AIDS literature and additionally to autofictional subjectivity, that is to say how the author defines his existence in relationship to his disease. This essay compares the 1998 Serpent’s Trail edition of In My Room to the 2021 Semiotext(e) edition by unpacking how retranslation affords a new opportunity to augment the author’s simultaneous relationship to his disease and his existence apart from it. In lieu of viewing retranslation as an exercise that highlights the inadequacies of first translations, I will highlight how queer subjectivity finds renewal and strength in the retranslation process.

To join the seminar on Teams click here.