Posts from September 2015

Transdisciplinary Problematics

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News, Papers (No comments yet)

For those of a heavy theory bent, the special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Transdisciplinary Problematics has finally appeared, including David Cunningham’s ‘Logics of Generalization: Derrida, Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity‘, as well as further articles by Eric Alliez, Etienne Balibar, Lisa Baraitser, Felix Guattari, Peter Osborne, Nina Power, Stella Sandford, Michel Serres, and others. Available from the TC&S website here.

Beck on Wark in RP

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News, Papers (No comments yet)

Catch it before it goes: John Beck’s review of McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy website here.

Buy the whole issue and get Lucy Bond’s review of Morgan Wortham’s Thought in Pain thrown in for good measure: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/issues/193

Selected Works of Andrew Lang nominated for Katharine Briggs Award

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News (No comments yet)

We’re delighted to report that Alex Warwick and Leigh Wilson’s co-edited Selected Writings of Andrew Lang (Edinburgh University Press) has been nominated for the Folklore Society’s 2015 Katharine Briggs Award (previously won by Vladimir Propp and E.P. Thompson, among others). The winner will be announced at a reception at the Warburg Institute on Wednesday 18th November.

Time to save up some money and buy a copy of the two volumes here.

British Story’s Magic Band

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News (1 comment)

A lovely compliment to Michael Nath’s “great, very intense book … the elegant, rococo noir-ish British Story” from the great guitarist and former Captain Beefheart collaborator Gary Lucas on his facebook site here.

In tribute, here are two of Gary’s own greatest, most intense moments…

And…

English Literature and Cultural Studies seminars

Written by on Friday, posted in News (No comments yet)

Wells Street

We have a great series of fortnightly seminars lined up for the new semester. Venue is Wells Street Room 105 at 5pm. All welcome.

14th October
Dr Victoria Browne (Oxford Brookes), with Sanna Melin.
‘Generational Politics in Feminist Theory’

4th November
Prof Andrew Benjamin (Kingston), with Kaja Marczewska, Matthew Charles and David Cunningham.
‘A Colloquium on Art’s Philosophical Work’

11th November
Dr Katherine Graham (Westminster), with Simon Avery.
‘“[N]or bear I in this breast / So much cold spirit to be called a woman”: the queerness of female revenge’

25th November
Dr Andreas Kramer (Goldsmiths), with John Beck.
‘Inventing Maps: Towards a Geography of the Avant-Garde’

9th December
Dr Shela Sheik (Goldsmiths), with tba.
‘Take This Instant: Video-testimony, Performativity and the Fabrication of Truth’

The Institute welcomes three new members

Written by on Monday, posted in News (No comments yet)

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

Sara Dominici

Sara Dominici works on photography and its cultural history within the fields of visual culture and cultural studies. Her ongoing research is in the visual culture of The Regent Street Polytechnic and its spin-off organisation, The Polytechnic Touring Association. Specifically, she is exploring the changing relationship between photography and travel and tourism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, investigating how the development of popular photography influenced the shifting relationship between ‘high’, or established, and ‘low’, or emerging, forms of culture. Sara completed a PhD at the University of Westminster (2014), and previously studied at La Sapienza University, Rome (Laurea quinquennale in Scienze della Comunicazione, 2004), at the London College of Communication (FdA in Photojournalism, 2006), and holds an MA in Visual Culture from the University of Westminster (2010). She has also worked as a picture editor in both commercial and non-profit organisations.

Kaja

Kaja Marczewska’s research interests span avant-garde and experimental literature and art, both contemporary and historical, conceptual art and writing, small press publishing, material texts, contemporary cultural, literary and art theory, digital aesthetics, as well as intersections of humanities and law. She holds a PhD in English from Durham University and an MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College, London. Kaja’s PhD, titled The Iterative TIMCCurn, investigated the implications of the increasingly prominent propensity to copy as a creative practice in contemporary culture. It was an attempt at defining a cultural condition that triggers novel attitudes to creativity and reconceptualising copying as a creative category. Her current research builds on ideas explored in the PhD and interrogates diverse aesthetic developments triggered by the turn towards iteration, including among others creative responses to online surveillance culture, experimental forms of writing criticism, the emergence of curating as a dominant contemporary model of cultural production, and digital kitsch.

Elinor

Elinor Taylor previously taught at the University of Salford, where she completed her PhD, and at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research so far has focused on relationships between British literary culture and the political left. In particular, she is interested interrelationships between Marxism, modernism and realism, the history of Marxism and Communism in Britain, theories of populism, and the novel form. Elinor is currently revising revising her doctoral thesis on fiction associated with the ‘Popular Front’ anti-fascist formation in Britain, as well as writing about Communist historical narrative. She is also interested in archival practices, especially in activist archives, and she plans to develop links with institutions of this kind in London.

The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer

Written by on Friday, posted in News (No comments yet)

Anne Witchard has contributed to the new collection Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, edited by Phil Baker and Anthony Clayton, and published by Strange Attractor Press. It’s a limited edition of 500 copies, so order your copy now! Further details here: http://strangeattractor.co.uk/books/lord-of-strange-deaths/

The Shaken and the Stirred: Canadian Literature event

Written by on Saturday, posted in Event (No comments yet)

The Centre for Law Society and Popular Culture, in conjunction with the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies is delighted to announce an international poetry event to be held at the University of Westminster on 13th October.

Hosted by the University of Westminster’s spoken word Artist in Residence, Mike Garry, “The Shaken and the Stirred”, a group comprising four renowned Canadian poets and novelists, will present their work in a public reading. The group, sponsored by the Centre for Creative Learning in Canada, includes prize winning authors Jeanette Lynes, Steven Heighton, Ian Burgham and Catherine Graham reading from their recently released and upcoming collections. For more on Mike Garry, including news of his recent Saint Anthony project, see here

These writers, all of whom have been recognized internationally, not only represent some of the best work being produced in Canada, but demonstrate a wide range of the types of poetry and themes that currently can be found in the Canadian literary landscape.  

Free tickets available at this link.