Departmental news

Ruby Tandoh is an author and journalist who’s written for the Observer, Vice and Elle. She’s currently a columnist for the Guardian’s Feast supplement and was a finalist on the 2013 Great British Bake Off. She has published two cookery books, Crumb and Flavour.

Ruby will be at the Talisman Theatre, Kenilworth, at 8pm on the 20th September 2018 (details available online) to talk about her latest book, Eat Up! – a ‘joyous manifesto for flavour and sanity’, which explores everything from gluttons and gourmets in the movies, to the symbolism of food and sex.  which was published in February 2018 and was a Sunday Times best-seller.

Ruby will be speaking in conversation with acclaimed food historian Professor Rebecca Earle of the Warwick University History Department.

Graeme Macdonald's Petrocultures event at Glasgow University this month was a huge success, reported on in the media, and with a sell-out Town Hall event. Congratulations to Graeme on a fantastic conference.

A foreign state sponsors a political assassination on English soil.

The attempt fails.

In its aftermath, Her Majesty's government asks her expert advisers:

What is the appropriate level of response?

What action can we take against murderous individuals --

and state sponsored terrorism?

Sound familiar?

But this case dates not from 2018 but 1584, when the Spanish Ambassador in London colluded in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I. The Queen's Privy Council wanted to execute Mendoza. The jurist Alberico Gentili said they couldn't -- because even criminal ambassadors were protected by the right to diplomatic immunity. The following year Gentili published his comprehensive treatise on the role of the ambassador, a book Henry Wotton undoubtedly knew when he arrived in Venice in 1604, instructed by King James to restore diplomatic relations between London and the Republic.

'Hear the Ambassadors: The Performance of Diplomacy in the Age of Shakespeare' is an exhibition that draws together the strands of this history. It thinks about the theory of embassy. It looks at fictions of embassy on Shakespeare's stage. And it displays the practice of Wotton's Venetian embassy. It gathers a rich collection original documents, objects, and early printed books to illustrate the performance of diplomacy. Curated by Warwick's Professor Carol Chillington Rutter in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the exhibition reminds us of the on-going work that ambassadors do to 'represent the person of the Prince' and to 'practice the healing art' of diplomacy.

The exhibition runs from until September 3 2018 in the Treasures Room of the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford upon Avon. It is funded by a grant from the Warwick Impact Fund.

Watch an interview with Professor David Anderson discussing the return of artefacts looted in imperial wars to their countries of origin, published on YouTube.
 

The poet, Professor David Morley of the University of Warwick Writing Programme, has been elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

The Fellowship is one of the highest honours for a writer. It encompasses the most distinguished authors working in the English language, including J.K. Rowling, Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Richard Ford, Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard.

Founded in 1820, The Royal Society of Literature is Britain’s national charity for the advancement of literature. It acts as a voice for the value of literature, encouraging and honouring great writers, and engaging people in appreciating literature.

Election as Fellow of the RSL is a uniquely prestigious honour, awarded by writers to writers.

New Fellows are offered the choice of signing the Society’s Roll Book with the pen of T.S. Eliot, Lord Byron or – new this year - George Eliot. In keeping with the honour being for his poetry, Morley signed with Byron’s.

A National Teaching Fellow, Professor Morley teaches on Warwick’s Writing Programme, and is a recent winner of The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for his collection The Invisible Gift, and The Cholmondeley Award for achievement in poetry from The Society of Authors.

On receiving the RSL Fellowship, Professor Morley commented:

‘My election to The Royal Society came out of the blue. It’s a huge honour for my poetry to be recognised by other writers in this way. I’m aware I’ve got a lot of work to do, and Fellowship of the RSL is a great boost. The RSL has an excellent schools outreach programme which I’m looking forward to being involved with. I hope to encourage more students from diverse and less privileged backgrounds to study creative writing at university and become authors themselves’.

The University of Warwick is pleased to announce that the submission period for the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is now open.

Inaugurated in 2017, the prize is awarded to the best eligible work of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction, work of fiction for children or young adults, or graphic novel, written by a woman, translated into English by a female or male translator, and published by a UK or Irish publisher.

The £1,000 prize is divided between the writer and her translator(s), with each contributor receiving an equal share.

Submissions are open until Tuesday 26 June, 2018, with the prize set to be awarded at an evening event held at the Warwick Arts Centre on Tuesday 13 November, 2018.

The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation aims to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership.

The 2017 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation was awarded to Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated from German by American translator Susan Bernofsky.

Commenting on the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Dr Chantal Wright, the prize’s coordinator and Associate Professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary studies said:

“The prize has already had tremendous effects in terms of awareness-raising around the issue of the under-representation of female authors in translation. We’re very much hoping for an increase this year on the 58 entries we received in 2017 and look forward to seeing which women authors have been made available in English by British and Irish publishers over the last twelve months.”

For full details of eligibility and how to enter, please go to: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/

For further information, please contact Tom Frew in the university press office at A.T.Frew@warwick.ac.uk or Chantal Wright at womenintranslation@warwick.ac.uk.

Prof Stephen Shapiro will be on a public panel for this event - Frontline #1: The Power of Direct Action + The Legacy of ACT UP

Full details can be found in the following link:

https://www.tynesidecinema.co.uk/film-and-events/view/frontline-1-power-direct-action-legacy-act

 
Professor Peter Marshall of the Warwick University History Department has been interviewed by Kurt Manwaring reagrding his new publication, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. The full interview is available on the From The Desk website and details of all the History Department's academic publications are available on the History Department website.

Kurt Manwaring is a freelance writer and contributor to many news sites, and holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Utah.

 
Susan Carruthers, Professor in American History at the Warwick University History Department, has had her article, 'When Americans Were Afraid of Being Brainwashed', published in The New York Times online, and in print in the Sunday Review section on Sunday 21st January 2018.

Dr Claire Shaw of the Warwick University History Department has been named in Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2017, recommended by Mark Edele:

"Claire L. Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917–1991 (Cornell) is a landmark in the history of disability and the Soviet welfare state. A stunning first book, it covers the entire Soviet experience from a thought-provoking perspective."

The full range of monographs and edited collections written or edited by the Warwick University History Department's academic staff is available online.