Wednesday 30th October, 5.00-7.00 pm
Room 152-153 (Cayley Room), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

A Thousand Words: Unpacking Dickens’ Pictures From Italy
Peter Orford (Buckingham)

In July 1844 Charles Dickens travelled with his family to Italy, basing himself in Genoa for a year. His adventures abroad were captured in his letters home, subsequently transformed into a newspaper series ‘Travelling Letters’ in 1846, and ultimately collected and bound into Pictures From Italy later that year. The final travel narrative, as it now exists, is therefore removed several times from Dickens’ initial experience up to two years earlier. In exploring the legitimacy of Pictures and its earlier incarnations to determine what constitutes the ‘true’ version of this text, the seminar will pose wider questions about authorial intention, editorial intervention and the elusiveness of creating a definitive edition.

Dr Peter Orford is Course Director for the MA by Research in Charles Dickens Studies at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (2018) and has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to prepare a new edition of Pictures From Italy.

All welcome, but guests from outside Westminster should RSVP Frankie Hines: frankie.hines@my.westminster.ac.uk OR Baptiste Danel: baptiste.danel@my.westminster.ac.uk

12 October 2019-25 January 2020
Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Moss Street, Bury BL9 0DR

The North West Art School Record Machine

Part of this year’s annual Design Manchester festival, The North West Art School Record Machine has been developed out of John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s 2018-19 survey of the region’s art school buildings (exhibited at Bluecoat in Liverpool). The often grand nineteenth century art schools were intended to train workers for local industry, but after the Second World War they also served to incubate the generations of musicians and designers responsible for transforming British popular culture. The art school became, among other things, a record machine.

For this new exhibition, photographs of some of the region’s most distinctive art schools are accompanied by a display of over 100 record sleeves, selected by Bluecoat’s Artistic Director Bryan Biggs, that represent work produced by designers and musicians who all, in one capacity or another, emerged from the art schools of the North West. To complete the exhibition, the Record Machine also presents a display of unique mock-ups and material from renowned North West-trained designers Malcolm Garrett and Swifty.

Forthcoming gallery talks:

Saturday 16 November 2-4pm: John Beck and Matthew Cornford
Introduction to The North West Art School Record Machine

Wednesday 20 November 7-9pm: Bryan Biggs
Record Machine Collecting records and the phenomena of record sleeve design

Saturday 23 November 4-6pm: Malcolm Garrett and Swifty
Designing Records Two influential designers talk about designing for the music industry

Admission FREE. For more information, email artgallery@bury.gov.uk
or visit www.buryartmuseum.co.uk

UPDATE: there is now a Spotify playlist for the show: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/042eRogev6EDrajRq2GzKH

Wednesday 16th October, 5.00-7.00 pm
Room 201, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Examining Coleridge’s Bulls: Humour, Fancy and the Political Imagination
Matthew Charles (IMCC / University of Westminster)

‘He’ll regret it till his dying day, if ever he lives that long’. The English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the bull, a type of humorous utterance, as ‘a mental juxtaposition of incongruous ideas with the sensation, but without the sense, of connection’. Coleridge repeatedly returns to this linguistic form in his notebooks and published writings between 1801 and 1817, with the bull coming to acquire a profound, albeit ambiguous, place within the aesthetics, philosophy and psychology of Coleridge’s attempts to define Romanticism, specifically in relation to his distinction between fantasy/imagination and allegory/symbol. Drawing on later modernist criticism of the false distinction between allegory and symbol, this talk proposes a comparable reconsideration of the devaluation of fancy in Coleridge’s broader ‘politics of the imagination’ and so a re-evaluation of the bull’s humour.

Matthew Charles is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster, and author of the forthcoming Modernism Between Benjamin and Goethe (Bloomsbury 2019).

All welcome, but guests from outside Westminster should RSVP Frankie Hines: frankie.hines@my.westminster.ac.uk OR Baptiste Danel: baptiste.danel@my.westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 6th November 2019, 5.30 – 8.00 pm
University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW

Techne: AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
Open Evening for Applicants for 2020 entry

Looking to do a PhD in 2020? Come and meet with academics, including those affiliated with the IMCC, to find out about the AHRC-funded techne doctoral studentships and programme of development, training and networking opportunities. Academic staff from all techne universities will be available to discuss your research proposal. We can’t guarantee an expert in your specific subject area, but all will be experienced in guiding doctoral applications. Administrators will also be on hand to advise on the application process.

For further details on the techne scheme see: http://www.techne.ac.uk/

Book a place at the open evening via this eventbrite link. Please register for one of the 3 sessions at 5:30pm, 6:15pm and 7pm. There will be refreshments available throughout the evening.

Thursday 10 October 2019, 5.30 – 7.00 pm
Room UG05, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Democracy Taken in Vice: Understanding the ‘Yellow Vests’ Event
Sophie Wahnich (CNRS/EHESS)

Sophie Wahnich is a Director of Research in History and Political Science at the French Institute of Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Anthropology of the Contemporary at the EHESS. She is a regular columnist for the daily newspaper Libération. Her work as an academic and public intellectual approaches contemporary issues facing Western democracies (terror, nationalism, globalisation, refugees, war, trauma, religion, collective memory), which she studies alongside the historical achievements and universal ideals of the French Revolution. Her book In Defence of the Terror was translated into English and published by Verso in 2012, with an introduction by Slavoj Zizek.

Part of the series French Politics: A Neighbour’s ‘History of the Present’, co-organised by the IMCC in collaboration with our friends in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, and with the support of the French Embassy and the Political Studies Association.

Free to attend, but booking via eventbrite is essential.

The latest series of English Literature and Culture research seminars for Autumn 2019 have now been announced, starting with a paper by the IMCC’s own Matthew Charles.

Wednesday 16th October, 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Room 201, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Examining Coleridge’s Bulls: Humour, Fancy and the Political Imagination
Matthew Charles (IMCC/University of Westminster)

Wednesday 30th October, 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

A Thousand Words: Unpicking Dickens’ Pictures from Italy
Peter Orford (University of Buckingham)

Wednesday 13th November, 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

A New ‘Form’ of Feminism: Mary Hays’ Female Biography (1803)
Susan Civale (Canterbury)

Wednesday 27th November, 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States
Lucy Bond (IMCC/University of Westminster) & Jessica Rapson (KCL)

Wednesday 11th December, 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Evil, Reborn: Remaking Disney and the Villain Intertext in Film and Popular Culture
Lorna Piatti-Farnell (Aukland University of Technology)

Friday 22 November, 2.00 – 4.00 pm
Meeting point: University of Westminster reception, 4–12 Little Titchfield Street, London W1W 7BY

Pop and Politics at PCL

‘Pop and Politics at PCL’ is a specially curated event celebrating the relationship between Pop and Politics at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL). PCL was the name between 1970 and 1992 of what is now the University of Westminster. The event includes a talk, musical performance and a small exhibition, and takes place on the anniversary of the day that Pete Shelley (Buzzcocks) turned up unannounced to play an acoustic set for students who had occupied the Poly’s Regent Street site.

The event is free, but booking is essential via this Eventbrite link.

This event is part of ‘Digging Deeper: Art, Music and Memory at the Soho Poly’, which is, in turn, part of the nationwide Being Human festival. Adding to this celebration, the University of Westminster is also hosting two other events:

On Monday 18 November, join award winning poet Dr Hannah Copley for a lunchtime exploration of music and memory in a zine workshop in the venue’s revived ‘Arts Workshop’.

In honour of its early incarnation as a folk club, come and disrupt your day on Thursday 21 November with a lunchtime gig by Martin Stephenson, one of the UK’s most perceptive and best-loved songwriters . This will be the first live concert in the iconic basement space since the last ‘Polyfolk’ performance in 1970.