The Whitechapel Salon: Matter Matters I: Popular Matters
Thursday 13^th May, 7pm
Study Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

The Whitechapel Salon is back! Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, the forthcoming year-long series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. Chris Horrocks, Principal Lecturer, Kingston University and Julian Stallabrass, Reader, Courtauld Institute of Art consider Popular Matters including mass culture, vernacular photography, Web 2.0 and user-generated content.

Book now to avoid disappointment! Book your ticket here.

Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

Wednesday 14th April, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
‘Naomi Mitchison: From Intermodernism to Science Fiction (via Mass-Observation)’

From her 1920s novels, influenced by Lawrence but aimed at the audience of Wells, to her subsequent deployment of modernist techniques for political ends, Naomi Mitchison may be considered a key intermodern writer. Her literary output during the 1930s – The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), Beyond This Limit (1934; a feminist fantasy illustrated by Wyndham Lewis), We Have Been Warned (1935), The Moral Basis of Politics (1938) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) – is comparable with Orwell’s. Her relentless pursuit of the ‘just society’, free from gender-based and sexual repression, made her a controversial figure even in that controversial decade. And her close literary associates of that decade – including Auden, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Stevie Smith, Wyndham Lewis and Walter Greenwood – suggest different ways of thinking about literary networks and cultural history in general. She was also a friend and supporter of Tom Harrisson and Mass-Observation, for whom she kept a wartime diary. Nick Hubble’s paper analyses this intermodern work and investigates how it relates to Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), a forerunner of the 1970s feminist utopian science fiction of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ.

Free to all.

Thursday 22nd April, 6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW

In the final event in the 21st Century London series of talks at Westminster Rachel Lichtenstein, author of Brick Lane and (with Iain Sinclair) Rodinsky’s Room, and Visiting Fellow at the IMCC, will be speaking at Regent Street.  

For more information, please email Monica Germana at m.germana@westminster.ac.uk. Events are free of charge, but booking is essential: please email Sharon Sinclair at sinclas@wmin.ac.uk to book a place.

Thursday 11th March, 6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW

Following a successful first event with urban visionary Iain Sinclair, in the second of a new series of talks at Westminster entitled 21st Century London, exploring the challenges and opportunities the city offers to the contemporary writer, Toby Litt will be speaking at Regent Street.  Toby was winner of the 2009 Manchester Fiction Prize, and his many novels include Corpsing (2000), Ghost Story (2004) and Hospital (2007). Future speakers will be Diran Adebayo (March 18) and visiting research fellow at the Institute Rachel Lichtenstein (April 22).

For more information, please email Monica Germana at m.germana@westminster.ac.uk. Events are free of charge, but booking is essential: please email Sharon Sinclair at sinclas@wmin.ac.uk to book a place.

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

Andrew Smith (University of Glamorgan)
‘Haunted Houses and History: Locating the Anglo-American in Henry James’

Free to all.

Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art
Saturday 1st May 2010, University of Westminster, London

Contemporary art shows renewed interest in ‘lost’, ‘obsolete’, and ‘archaic’ visual media forms and the illusion-producing processes of the past—for example: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, stereoscopy, Victorian stage illusion, shadowgraphy, optical toys, the panorama and stylised period representations such as the imagery of spiritualism, automatic writing, audio-technologies and early photographic techniques.

Co-organised by the Magic Lantern Society and the IMCC—in the wake of 2009-10’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster—Old Media / New Work will provide a forum at which artists working with or around such ‘lost’ concepts and technologies can come together to show, discuss, and explore their own work in context of these past techniques, their contemporary relevance, and their future possibilities. The conference will also be documented and continued by a new WordPress website that will allow participants to upload images, texts and comments.

Confirmed participants include: Jonathan Allen; Geoff Coupland; Mark Ferelli; Mark Jackson; Juliette Kristensen; Susan MacWilliam; Olivia Plender; Joseph Ramirez; Aura Satz; Dan Smith; Simon Warner; Isabel White

The organisers, Mervyn Heard and Sas Mays, welcome participation from established practitioners, as well as up-and-coming artists and researchers and specialists in the field. Interested parties should send a short (250-word) description of their topic and their CV, by 14^th March 2010, to: OldMediaNewWork@live.com

Wednesday 24th February, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nigel Mapp (University of Tampere, Finland)
‘Milton, Life, Heresy’

Free to all.

Wednesday 24th February, 4.15pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joe Bray (University of Sheffield)
‘Conceptual Metaphor and the Language of the Early Nineteenth-Century Portrait’

Hosted by our colleagues in Westminster’s English Language and Linguistics section, Joe Bray examines the meanings generated by frequent references, both literal and metaphorical, to the portrait in the early nineteenth-century novel. As critics have noted, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel drew on a well-developed cultural understanding of the portrait-novel connection, and this is particularly true of the novels analysed in this paper: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). Each novel is extensively permeated by a metaphor of the countenance, or in some cases the whole body, as a painted portrait. The mapping involved would seem to create a ‘blended space’ which suggests that the emotions on the face can be easily read and understood, and thus that the body serves as a reliable index to ‘character’. Yet the implications of transparency and legibility that the metaphor of the painted countenance evokes are challenged in various ways in each novel.

Free to all.

Visual Culture Studies in Europe

Friday’s international conference entitled ‘Visual Culture Studies in Europe’, hosted by the Institute, was a huge success. A stella cast of leading academics, curators, and editors from Austria, Spain, Croatia, Norway, Belarus, Italy, England, and France including Iain Chambers, Oliver Grau, and Adrian Rifkin came together to discuss the study of visual culture within the context of European universities, art colleagues, and cultural institutions. The audience, a talkative mix of staff and students from Westminster as well as welcome guests from elsewhere in London, Brighton, and as far away as Lithuania, had a day to remember. The conference speakers, members of the Visual Culture Studies in Europe Network, plan to meet again next year, this time in Barca!

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

Jonathan Cranfield (University of Kent)
‘Veneers of Science: Science and Ideology in The Strand Magazine’

Free to all.

Friday 5 February 2010

Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW

Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

10:00 Introduction

10:15-12:30 Session 1: Cartographies of Power
Iain Chambers, University of Naples, Italy
Joachin Barriendos, Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, and Professor Anna Maria Guasch, University of Barcelona, Spain
Dr Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University, Belarus/Lithuania

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:45: Session 2: Education, Education, Education
Professor Adrian Rifkin, Goldsmiths, University of London, England
Lorraine Audric and Professor Andre Gunthert, Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian, University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway

3:45-4:15 Break

4:15-6:30: Session 3: Projects
Dr Oyvind Vagnes, University of Bergen, Norway
Kresimir Purgar, Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia
Professor Oliver Grau, Danube University, Krems, Austria

Tuesday 16th February, 3.00-5.00pm
Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster)
‘What’s the actual title? The Game of War: Understanding Situationist’

Hosted by our nextdoor neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, colleague and fellow traveller Richard Barbrook talks about Guy Debord and Class Wargames. Free to all.

Find out more about Class Wargames here.

Wednesday 27th January, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Peter Johnston (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘The Mathematical Contexts of J.M. Coetzee’s Early Poetry (1958-1964)’

Free to all.

Wednesday January 13th 2010, 5.00pm
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Professor Toby Miller (University of California, Riverside)
“Cultural Policy Redux”

Toby Miller is editor of the journal Television & New Media, and author of many books including Spyscreen (Oxford University Press), Television (Routledge), Television Studies (BFI), Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Sage), Technologies of Truth (University of Minnesota Press), The Avengers (BFI), and The Well Tempered Citizen (The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Friday 15 January 2010, 10am-4.30pm with public lecture at 5pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Our next door neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) are hosting their annual CSD Encounter on Friday 15^th January 2010. Following recent encounters with Julia Kristeva and Stuart Hall, this year’s one-day event will be focused on the work of Charles Taylor, with two workshop sessions followed by a public lecture by Professor Taylor himself on ‘Secularism and Multiculturalism’. Workshop speakers include Grace Davie, Steven Lukes, Tariq Modood, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Mulhall.

For further information and to RSVP email: Jessica.schmidt@my.westminster.ac.uk

For our Dutch friends: Director of the IMCC, Marq Smith, is contributing to Epistemic Encounters, on the future of the Graduate Art School, at MaHKU (The Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design) this Friday 11 December, as part of an ongoing research project exploring the specificity of artistic knowledge production in the context of exhibition making, art in public space projects, and the significance of research-based practices for the (reformulation of the) curriculum in the current art academy. Why not join him…

Further details here.

The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive.

A call for papers for a workshop organised by the Centre for German Jewish Studies at Sussex and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at Westminster
23^rd – 24^th June 2010

Abstracts by the end of January 2010 to: theholeintime@live.com

Left discussions of politics and history owe much to German-Jewish theories of temporality that emerged in response to the political crises of twentieth-century Europe; yet, other than in the attention paid to issues of technological memory in Benjamin, there has been relatively little discussion of the archival ramifications of, for example, Adorno, Bloch, Celan, Rosenzweig, and Simmel, as well as other canonical Marxist thinkers. While Benjamin’s thought has often been mobilised to think the revolutionary potential of the archive, less has been done to think through the archival attitudes and implications of the work of such other thinkers, or the extent to which such attitudes are specifically predicated upon German and Jewish philosophical and political tradition. Continue reading Call for Papers: Temporality and the Archive

A very successful one-day colloquium at 309 Regent Street celebrating the centenary of Ezra Pound’s lectures at the Regent Street Polytechnic on Friday 4th, with presentations from Massimo Bacigalupo, Walter Baumann, Becky Beasley, Helen Carr, Nick Selby and biographer David Moody, in front of an audience also including Ian Bell and Peter Brooker, among many others.

As an addendum to the day’s events, here’s a chronology of Pound’s involvement with the old Polytechnic: Continue reading Pound at the Poly: A Chronology

Wednesday 9th December, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Mary Grover (Sheffield Hallam University)
‘Why Middlebrow Matters’

Free to all.

Michael Nath & Anne Witchard Book Launch
Monday 14 December 2009
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, 6pm onwards

Two members of the Institute are launching their new books at Westminster on the 14^th December. Michael Nath will be reading from his first novel, La Rochelle, published by Route, while Anne Witchard will be introducing her marvellous monograph Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.