Wednesday 1 December 2010, 4.15-5.45pm
Room 306, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Siobhan Chapman (University of Liverpool)
‘Implicated Meanings in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night: a Neo-Gricean Approach’

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

UPDATE: REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS UNFORTUNATELY NOW CLOSED

The programme for Apocalypse and its Discontents has been announced. See below the line for details.

Admission is free, but to register please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

  Continue reading Apocalypse and its Discontents: Programme Announced

For our Spanish friends: this coming Saturday 4^th December, IMCC Director Marq Smith will be one of those contributing to As the Academy Turns, a three-day symposium organised as part of Manifesta 8 at CENDEAC, Centro Parraga, Murcia.

As the Academy Turns is a multilayered project exploring the potentials and the tensions in the growth of artistic research and the current academization of art education. The ‘academicisation’ of art is increasingly marked by the strong expectation of research trajectories and how these will be shaped within the changing institutional framework of art education. In that context, the present possibilities of PhD research within visual art are particularly at the centre of attention and debate. What do those challenges mean for the art academy as such? Will novel forms of academic elitism pop up or will research induce a novel form of intellectual conscience in the art academy? How will research and artistic practice be intertwined? Will they produce redefinitions in both domains or is research rather doomed to be a fringe phenomenon at the art academy? And the ultimate question, how will research be conducted within art academies?

The programme is here.

At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference hosted by the IMCC in May, the final session discussed the prospect of establishing an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During this session, a motion was put forward to establish the Association; the motion was carried.

We’ve set up an online forum as a space where we can discuss the Association, its purpose, role, ambitions, aims and objectives, etc. You are invited to contribute to these on-going discussions by registering as a user at www.journalofvisualculture.org/bbpress. Once you have registered, you will have to be approved as a user (so we can stop trolls and spam). Do bear with us as we open up this forum to you all. Should you encounter any technical issues, please email contact@visualculturestudies.org.

About the online forum

We have kept the forum open, with one section for aims and objectives, and another for activities – please feel free to add topics under these headings. Also if you have any suggestions for the forum’s development, do let us know.

To explore the Association’s possible composition, structure and purpose, one forum asks:
How do we need to imagine this community of scholars, students, emerging scholars, curators, educators, museum professionals, practitioners, and cultural sector specialists?
What are the academic, intellectual, and professional ambitions of the Association?

To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:
What will the Association do?
What kind of forums are most appropriate/necessary (meetings, networks, conferences, etc.) to support the activities of this community, and facilitate the (formal and informal) exchange of ideas and information, as well as its conviviality, sociality, and collaborative impulse?

Here’s to New York City 2012, and to the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies. And to the many productive conversations that will take place in the next few weeks and months – many thanks for contributing.

Wednesday 24 November 2010, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)
‘Martian Astronomy and Popular Fiction’

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Boundaries and Communities
Friday 26 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

David Cunningham will be one of the participants in a discussion at The Showroom gallery in North West London organised as part of the exhibition The Church Street Partners’ Gazette curated by Turkish artist Can Altay. Boundaries and Communities focuses on visible and invisible boundaries, how they are negotiated, neglected, transgressed, or forcefully maintained, in the contemporary metropolis. Other contributors include: Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell and Partners), Janna Graham (Serpentine Gallery), Chloe McCarthy (My City Too), Jonathan Mosley (architect) and a representative of the Migrants Resource Centre.

The Showroom is a short walk from Edgware Road underground station, which is served by the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Bakerloo lines.

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

UPDATE: REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS UNFORTUNATELY NOW CLOSED

Registration is now open for the Apocalypse and its Discontents conference. Admission is free, but please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana so as to give her an idea of numbers: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers:
John R. Hall (University of California, Davis)
Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway)
Pat Wheeler (Hertfordshire)

David Cunningham’s essay ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, published in the September issue of Radical Philosophy, is now available online as a pdf on the journal’s Recent Highlights page of their website.

Download it here.

Update: David will be speaking on Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 24 November (4-6pm). He’ll also be in Glasgow on Thursday 25 giving a talk on the concept of modernism.

Wednesday 10^th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joanne Murray (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“JG Ballard and New Brutalism”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture seminar series at Westminster here.

Monday 29 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Foyer, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster is holding a wine reception to celebrate the publication of a plethora of new books, many of which have been publicised already on this site: new books on creative writing and on Scottish women’s gothic by Matt Morrison and Monica Germana, respectively; the collection London Gothic, co-edited by Anne Witchard; and new editions of Mary Coleridge’s poetry and Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael by Simon Avery and Alexandra Warwick.

If you’d like to attend email Sharon Sinclair at: sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

For the interest, entertainment, and amusement of IMCC-types: A new publication of visual and material culture, a newspaper called Paperweight, has been launched in the last week.

Paperweight draws together writers, researchers, academics, enthusiasts, designers, artists and curators, with each issue taking a timely theme related to visual and material culture; contributors use this theme as a starting point, or an end point, or something in-between, to explore the territory from different vantage points. The aim for the publication is to offer an alternative space to the journal article, the book, the exhibition catalogue or the gallery; and to promote the work of visual and material culture to as broad an audience as possible. For more information see here.

The first issue of Paperweight, ‘Screen: The Birthday Issue’ is now available for sale via the newspaper’s website for an incredibly modest £3. To order a copy, see here. As a special introductory offer,Paperweight is also offering a subscription to issues 2 and 3 for only £4.

The contents of the first issue of Paperweight are:
Mervyn Heard on Smoke Screens / Øyvind Vågnes on the Cultural History of the Zapruder Film / Matt Lodder on Televising the Tattoo / Marquard Smith on Metadata / Howard Pensly on Boatology / Zoe Hendon on Sun and Screens / Laine Nooney on Female Gamers / Geo Takach on Writing Between Stage and Screen / Paul Micklethwaite on Screen Ecology / Scientific Encounters with Alexander Doust / Harriet Riches on Sally Mann’s ‘The Family and The Land’ / Rebecca Onion with Some Notes on Toys

The second issue, due for publication in April 2010, will take ‘ghosts’ as its theme. Ideas for possible submissions are invited through submissions@polygraphia.co.uk.