Posts from September 2012

The IMCC welcomes Allan Stoekl, Visiting Professor in the Institute

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The Institute is excited and delighted to welcome our new Visiting Professor in the IMCC, Professor Allan Stoekl. Allan will be based at the Institute during 2012-13, while on research leave in London from his position as Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Allan’s many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He was editor of a seminal special issue of Yale French Studies, ‘On Bataille’ (1990), and also translated Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike (2003).

During his time at Westminster, Allan will be working on a new book provisionally entitled Avatars of the Postsustainable City, while also contributing to the work of the Institute in various ways. We very much look forward to working with him!

Alexa Wright at Digital Aesthetic, Oct 5-6

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Alexa Wright is taking part in Digital Aesthetic³ 2012, an international exhibition and conference which explores the impact that the digital has on our sense of self and our relationship to the physical world. The exhibition is housed in the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, and the University of Central Lancashire’s PR1 Gallery in Preston. It demonstrates some of the diverse ways that artists are utilising digital technology, including projection, digital print, 3d work, screen based video work, touch panel installation, and a live interactive website. The conference takes place over Friday Oct 5th and Saturday Oct 6th. In a great line up, other participants include Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt and Sophie Calle.

Further details at: http://digitalaesthetic.org.uk/

English Literature and Culture Research Seminars Oct-Nov 2012

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Advance news of the next series of English Literature and Culture research seminars taking place in the first semester this year.

Seminars are fortnightly on Wednesday afternoons, from 4pm to around 5.30pm, and will be held in room 106 in the University’s Wells Street building.

Wednesday 17th October
Christopher Daley (University of Westminster)
‘Too Many Machines’: British Science Fiction Film and Television of the 1950s

Wednesday 31st October
Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck College)
Did we Miss it? The Legacy of Cyberculture in Contemporary Representations of Digital Technology

Wednesday 14th November
Bianca Leggett (Birkbeck College)
Englishness Elsewhere: Considering Cosmopolitanism in the English Travel Novel

Wednesday 28th November
Martin Eve (University of Sussex)
‘Opening children’s eyes’: Pynchon, Bolano, Overloaded Forms and the Didactic Function

The Institute welcomes three new members

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The Institute is delighted to welcome three new members who are joining the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies this academic year.

Georgina Colby joins us as a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. She is the author of Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (Palgrave), and is currently working on a second book on the author Kathy Acker. She has also published widely on the intersections of literary practice and visual culture in contemporary US art, and is presently organising a major series of events to be held in London on ‘Death and the Contemporary’.

Lucy Bond is joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Her PhD at Goldsmiths focused on the commemoration of 9/11 in the American public sphere, looking particularly at memorial practices embodied in literature and material culture, and at the ways in which a reification of the discourse surrounding the attacks has limited the production of a successful counter-narrative able to critique the attacks’ appropriation and manipulation by the institutions and individuals of the wider hegemonic sphere.

Matt Charles is also joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Matt’s PhD thesis was completed at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, now based at Kingston University, titled ‘Speculative Experience and History: Walter Benjamin’s Goethean Kantianism’. He is also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy. Matt’s current research concerns theories of mass education, and the recent pedagogical turn in theory, and he will be organising a major conference on Walter Benjamin’s pedagogic materialism at Westminster later next year.

New Journal Launch: Architecture_Media_Politics_Society

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ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is a new on-line, fully peer reviewed academic journal.

The journal is a forum for the analysis of architecture in the mediated environment of contemporary culture. It seeks to expand an understanding of architecture and its relationship with media, politics and society in its broadest sense. One international paper is published each month that deals with an issue or theme relevant to the journal. Dual language publications are encouraged. Selected authors are also invited to submit articles for a printed version of the journal.

Currently, the journal forum operates as a platform for a research project entitled Architecture as Political Image; an investigation into the use of architecture in political campaign imagery in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is run in affiliation with Ravensbourne (University College), London, and Florida State University, Tallahassee.

ISSN 2050-9006 For details about submissions visit the web site: www.architecturemps.com

UPDATE: The second volume of issue one has just been published entitled Mythopoetics of the Kunsthalle. The issue contains an article arguing for a major reconsideration of the architectural profession that uses the notion of the Kunsthalle as its theoretical framework. The author, Manuel Schartzberg, is an architect and tutor currently working in the US. Previously, he worked for David Chipperfield Architects in the UK and his paper is partly based on his time there. You can read it at the web site: www.architecturemps.com