Wednesday 26th October, 5.00 – 7.00
Room 412, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1T

“The married woman worker in fiction, c. 1870-1960”
Helen Glew (History, Westminster)

This paper forms part of a wider social and cultural history of the marriage bar and married women’s right to do paid work in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries. By examining fictional depictions of working wives in British, Canadian and US novels and short stories in this period – and also considering reactions to these – the paper will explore the ways in which fiction was used alternately as a means to critique society, to reimagine established norms or to act as a conservative or cautionary voice.

All welcome! (Please note the change of room and building from the previous seminar in the series.)

Veronica Posada, who is currently studying on our MA Art and Visual Culture, is organising a screening of The Seven Sisters Indoor Market Film on Friday 4th of November at 6:30pm, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers. The screening is part of Veronica’s participation in the Mitologia de la Tierra exhibition of seven Colombian artists at the Koppel Project in London (93 Baker Street, W1U 6RL), in which she is also presenting work from her research project ‘Mapping Memories’ (with Lorena Raigoso). Further details here.

Mapping Memories is a research tool and visibilization platform that supports recognition of Latin Americans in the UK, as well as promoting processes of unification and resistance against gentrification. See their website at: http://mappingmemory.weebly.com/

Friday 21st October, 7pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1

Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London book launch

We’re delighted to pass on an invitation to the book launch for Simon Avery and Kate Graham’s fabulous collection Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c. 1850 to the Present, which has just been published by Bloomsbury.

To help with catering, please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sex-time-and-place-book-launch-tickets-28363251248

Wednesday 30th November, 2.00 – 5.00
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus

“The Baths”

One of our MA Art and Visual Culture students Sofia Pancucci-Mcqueen will (with her co-director Anouska Samms) be presenting her documentary “The Baths”, and accompanying research, to students on the Film and Television: Theory, Culture and Industry MA at Westminster. All staff and students welcome!

Tucked away in the corner of an industrial estate in Canning Town is a steam baths where men meet to wash, eat and chat. Visited daily by culturally diverse groups, it’s where bathing rituals intertwine and collective memories are forged. Made by two female filmmakers, Anouska Samms and Sofia Pancucci-McQueen, the documentary explores masculinity in a unique setting and invites us to observe often unseen cultural traditions that are integral to the lives of those who practice them.

The film highlights the transcultural nature of the baths whereby seemingly disparate traditions are continually exchanged. While each group may at first sight appear separate from one another, it soon becomes apparent that in sharing the same space they are also sharing wider cultural histories.

You can watch a trailer for the film here: https://vimeo.com/185019337

Monday 24th October, 6.00 – 8.00
Room M416, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1

The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance

An invitation to the book launch for our friend Doug Spencer’s The Architecture of Neoliberalism, published by Bloomsbury. A talk by Doug about the book will be followed by a panel discussion with IMCC affiliate Jon Goodbun, Peg Rawes from the Bartlett School of Architecture and David Chandler from Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Democracy.

Look out, too, for a later one-day event at the Architectural Association on Friday 25th November, The (Dis)Enchanted Subject of Architecture, also timed to celebrate the publication of Doug’s book, with speakers including Libero Andreotti, Nadir Lahiji, Joan Ockman, Nina Power and the IMCC’s own David Cunningham. Details here: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3500

Wednesday 12th October, 5.00 – 7.00
Room 310, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

“The British Communist Historical Novel: Marxism, Modernity and Historiography”
Elinor Taylor (Westminster)

In 1935, following the failures of revolutionary movements in Europe and the advances of fascism, the Comintern abandoned its sectarian ‘class-against-class’ policy and advocated instead the strategy of the Popular Front, an anti-fascist bloc that had as its base a ‘united front’ of working-class organisations and, predicated on that, a wider popular alliance. Central to this new orientation in Communism politics was a stress on national histories and traditions as the site and means of resistance to a fascism that was, as the Comintern’s General Secretary put it, ‘rummaging through the entire history of every nation’ for its means of national cultural legitimation. This paper considers the historical novel as a crucial historiographic genre for British communists in the late 1930s and early 1940s, focusing on a trilogy of novels of English history by Jack Lindsay. While in certain ways this trilogy, spanning the English civil war to the revolutions of 1848, seems to obediently answer the Comintern’s call for the cultural representation of national histories, it sceptically traces the arc of ‘bourgeois revolution’ as it was formulated in classical Marxist historiography, and in so doing stages a series of problematics – over the constitution of English modernity and the nature of class succession – that were inadmissible in other arenas. But the trilogy also constitutes a self-reflexive meditation on the novel’s own conditions of possibility and its political limits. In Georg Lukács’s 1937 study of the historical novel, it was the revolutionising energy of the bourgeoisie before 1848 that enabled the historical novel to access certain ‘epic’ qualities, and the final chapter of that work is organised around the claim that the Popular Front made possible the end of the genre’s retrograde, post-1848 phase. Lindsay’s work, however, might suggest a need to move out of and beyond the novel form, in its competing realist and modernist configurations, altogether, and the paper considers the ways that Lindsay’s work glimpses this other, unrealised form.

All welcome! Followed by drinks at the Green Man …

The programme for this semester’s English Literature and Cultural Studies research seminar series at Westminster has been announced. The seminars will take place every other Wednesday, from 5-7pm, in room 310 in the University’s Wells Street building, followed, as ever, by a short discussion and drinks in The Green Man.

Wednesday 12 October

“The British Communist Historical Novel: Marxism, Modernity and Historiography”
Elinor Taylor (Westminster/IMCC)

Wednesday 26 October

“The married woman worker in fiction, c. 1870-1960”
Helen Glew (History, Westminster),

Wednesday 9 November

“Lying, Testimony and Murder in Early Modern England: The Case of Annis and George Dell (1606)”
Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex)

Wednesday 23 November

“‘Detestable residue’: phobic resistances from Freud to Lyotard”
Simon Morgan Wortham (Kingston University)

Wednesday 7 December

“Picturing the Perpetrator”
Paul Lowe (University of Arts, London)

All very welcome!

Saturday 15th October, 9.15 – 6.45 (followed by reception)
University of Westminster, London

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Legacies of Aurora Leigh: Literature, Politics, Society

On Saturday 15 October, the Department of English, Linguistics & Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster is hosting a one day conference on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Legacies of Aurora Leigh. The day will include a range of talks on how Barrett Browning’s major work influenced later writers and thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and our two keynote speakers will be Professor Marjorie Stone, from Dalhousie University, and Professor Margaret Reynolds, from Queen Mary, University of London. There will also be a roundtable discussion on the future of Barrett Browning studies with Professor Cora Kaplan and a reading of extracts from Aurora Leigh by actor and writer, Sharon Eckman. The full programme can be found on the conference website at: https://auroraleigh2016.wordpress.com/programme/

Registration is now open. Attendance at the conference is free but all attendees need to register through the conference website at: https://auroraleigh2016.wordpress.com/registration/

Zodiac, drawing and wall mural (2015).

Wednesday September 14th, 2016, 7-9pm.
Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8EQ.

£5 Tickets available here.

Dawn Poetics: Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with Marina Warner

Artist, writer and performer, Caroline Bergvall, will perform and present a few video documents from earlier works of which Ghost Cargo (2011), Drift (2014) before introducing her performance Ragadawn (2016). Ragadawn, Caroline’s much anticipated new work is a sunrise performance, which explores the crossing of boundaries and altered states of being through vocal composition, rhythmical speech patterns and recorded languages. Following the presentation and screenings, Caroline will join Professor Marina Warner in conversation to talk about dawn poetics, metamorphosis, liminality, gendering, and darkness and light.

Ragadawn (2016) will premiere in the UK as a one-off performance at the Estuary Festival, Sunday 18th September, 2016, 6:38am. The work is co-produced by Metal, Southend-on-Sea, and Festival de la Batie, Geneva. Ragadawn will embark on an international tour in 2017. Ragadawn is supported by Ville de Genève, Etat de Genève, Fondation Wilsdorf, Fondation Göhner and Royal Norwegian Embassy, London.

This event is part of the series Experimental Writing @ Carroll Fletcher, hosted by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture in collaboration with Carroll Fletcher Gallery. For more information about the event, please contact Georgina Colby at g.colby@westminster.ac.uk

CAROLINE BERGVALL is an artist, writer and performer who works across artforms, media and languages. The recipient of many awards and commissions, her work frequently develops through exploring material traces, literary documents and linguistic detail, language and literary history, sites and histories, hidden or forgotten knowledges. Her sparse textual, spatial and audio works often expose hidden or difficult historical/political events. She is especially noted for her researched multigenre textual work and her strong verbal and vocal performances. Projects alternate between books, printed matter, audio pieces, collaborative performances, site-specific installations. Caroline is based in London and Geneva.

Most recent project: DRIFT (2013-2015): Texts, drawings and maps published as Drift by Nightboat Books (NY, 2014). A collaborative performance involving voice, percussion, datawork toured the UK and Scandinavia (2014) and premieres in Geneva Switzerland (2016). Solo show of graphic works and audio compositions at Callicoon Fine Art gallery (NY, 2015) and CAC (Geneva, 2016). New audio commission TOGETHER (2014), voicework in 3 parts, Swiss radio RTS2 & MAMCO Museum of Contemporary Art (Geneva). Premieres as a performance at Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, Oct’16.

Other available publications: Meddle English: New and Selected Texts (Nightboat Books, 2011), Middling English (John Hansard Publications, 2010), DVD of installations, Ghost Pieces: five language-based installations (John Hansard Publications, 2011).

Various selected solo and group shows: Whitney Biennial (NY), Tate Modern (London), Louisiania Literature Festival (Copenhagen), Khoj Art Centre (New Delhi), MCA (Denver), The Power Plant Gallery (Toronto), Norrlandsoperan (Sweden), Actoral (Marseille), Poetry International (Southbank Centre), Fundacio Tapiès (Barcelona), Hammer Museum (LA), KUMU (Tallinn), MOMA (NY), Samtidsmuseet (Oslo), Villa Bernasconi (Geneva), Shorelines Literature of the Sea (Southend).

Caroline was Judith E, Wilson Fellow, University of Cambridge (2013-2014), Writer-in-Residence, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014), Visiting Professor, School of Art and Design, Geneva (2014-2015). Currently a Collaborative Arts Mellon Fellow, Logan Center, University of Chicago (2016).

MARINA WARNER is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS, 2014-2017.

Marina Warner’s mother was Italian and her father an English bookseller; she was brought up in Egypt, Belgium, and Cambridge, England. She has been a writer since she was young, specialising in mythology and fairy-tales, with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (l982), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman (1998). In 1994 she gave the BBC Reith Lectures on the theme of Six Myths of Our Time. Her books include Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011). She also writes fiction: The Lost Father (1988), was short listed for the Booker prize, and in 2000, The Leto Bundle (2000) was long-listed. She has curated exhibitions, including The Inner Eye (1996), Metamorphing (2002-3), and Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing (2005). She chaired the Man Booker International Prize for 2015, and from 2013-15 she was a Two Year Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (OUP, 2014) will be coming out in paperback later this year. A collection of short stories Fly Away Home was published by Salt in autumn 2015. She is currently working on the theme of Sanctuary and culture in times of dislocation and diaspora, and is writing a memoir-cum-novel set in Cairo in the Fifties.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made DBE in 2015, and the same year was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities.

Saturday 17 – Sunday 18 September 2016
The Thames Estuary

Shorelines Literature Festival

Time to book your tickets for the Shorelines Literature Festival curated by our very own Rachel Lichtenstein. Taking place over the weekend of September 17-18, writers, artists, film-makers and performers – including Deborah Levy, Horatio Clare, Rose George and Patrick Wright – explore the Thames Estuary and related themes, alongside tours of Tilbury Port, Family Activities and Riverside Walks.

Rachel will also launch her new book Estuary: Out from London to the Sea (2016, Hamish Hamilton) at the festival at 5pm on Saturday 17 September; an immersive, intimate journey into the world of the Thames Estuary and the people who spend time there. Over many years she has travelled the length and breadth of this historic waterway many times over in vessels ranging from hardy tugboats to sailing barges to an inflatable military dinghy whilst gathering an extraordinary chorus of voices: mudlarkers and fishermen, radio pirates and champion racers, divers and oystercatchers, along with the men who risk their lives out on the water and the women who wait on the shore. In this sparkling new book she captures these stories before they vanish from living memory, and merges them with personal experience of this place along with layers from different periods of history.

Further details at: http://www.estuaryfestival.com/event/detail/shorelines

Veronica Posada, who is currently studying on our MA Art and Visual Culture, will be presenting work from her research project ‘Mapping Memories’ (with Lorena Raigoso) alongside the Mitologia de la Tierra exhibition of seven Colombian artists at the Koppel Project in London (93 Baker Street, W1U 6RL). The show runs from September 15th to November 5th 2016. Further details here.

Mapping Memories is a research tool and visibilization platform that supports recognition of Latin Americans in the UK, as well as promoting processes of unification and resistance against gentrification. See their website at: http://mappingmemory.weebly.com/

Thursday 30 June 2016
Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

Forms of Criticism

Forms of Criticism proposes to think about critical practice as a creative experiment with form in its own right and invites a re-examination of the relationship between research and forms adopted for presenting, communicating, and disseminating it. By considering diverse sites of critical and creative production the project focuses on experimenting with modalities of criticism and ways of addressing formal critical-creative hybridity.

The event brings together artist, curators, writers, critics and scholars addressing questions of hybrid creative-critical forms in theory and practice though talks, performances, screenings, readings and installations. Speakers include: John Beck (IMCC), Kate Briggs (American University in Paris), Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto), Ducks!, Gary Hall (Coventry University & Open Humanities Press), Peter Jaeger (poet and critic, Roehampton), Kristen Kreider (poet and artist, Royal Holloway), Richard Misek (filmmaker), Simon Morris (Leeds Beckett University), Jo Collinson Scott (musician and musicologist), Marquard Smith (Journal of Visual Culture and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), and Nick Thurston (artist, University of Pennsylvania and Leeds).

The event is free and open to all but places are limited and booking is essential. For more information about the event and to reserve tickets please go to: http://www.formsofcriticism.net/

For more information, please contact Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westminster.ac.uk

Tuesday 5th July 2016, 3-6 pm
University of Westminster, 4 – 12 Little Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7BY

Our friends in the Westminster Law School has collaborated with Imperial War Museums (IWM) to show the UNESCO listed film The Battle of the Somme, to audiences across the world. Shot and screened in 1916, it was the first feature length documentary about war and changed the way both cinema and film was perceived by the public. In the year of its release around 20 million people, almost half the population of Britain at the time, watched The Battle of the Somme many hoping to see the image of a loved-one, or friend captured on film. One hundred years later, this unique film from IWM’s collection, is being shown to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.

The event will be held at the University of Westminster building at Little Titchfield Street, London. The screening of the film will be followed by food and drink refreshments in Portland Hall where there will be additional archive material, displays and information to mark the centenary of this historic event.

Book a place here.

Saturday 25th 2016, 3.30 – 6.00 pm, followed by reception
Sunday 26th June 2016, 11.30 am – 5.30 pm
Room UG04, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

The Hypothetical: Institutions, Fictions, Environments

A hypothesis is literally a placing under, and thus a foundation or basis for an argument. As a foundation, though, a hypothesis is less than concrete; it is a starting point, a premise, a conjecture, a supposition. A hypothesis stands in a provisional relation to the known facts — may, indeed, fly in the face of the facts — and at worst can be described as a mere assumption or guess. A hypothesis, then, is a provocation. It demands investigation, testing, evaluation, perhaps refutation. A hypothesis has expectations.

The purpose of this conference is to interrogate the ramifications of the hypothetical in its philosophical, scientific, technological, historical, literary and artistic forms. How do the fictional, the conjectural, or the notional provide the operational conditions for new knowledge, new social and political forms, and new modes of describing the world? What are the temporalities that govern the hypothetical? How does the hypothetical put pressure on existing forms and practices, within and across the arts and the sciences? Are there limits — organisational, structural, ideological, disciplinary — beyond which the hypothetical collapses into the simply impossible? Or is the impossible an ideological bracketing of the emancipatory potential of the hypothetical? Alternatively, does the hypothetical run the risk of producing hypocriticism, a mode of reflexive and opportunist self-interest that merely reinscribes the position of the hypothesist?

Speakers: Claudia Aradau (King’s College London); Mark Currie (Queen Mary, University of London); Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (by video link) (The New School, New York City); Mikhail Epstein (Emory University); Greg Garrard (University of British Columbia); John Richard Sageng (University of Oslo); David Wittenberg (University of Iowa).

View the conference programme here

The conference is free but it is essential to register via Eventbrite

Amanda Millis who is currently studying on the IMCC’s Art and Visual Culture MA is giving a talk this evening, Friday 24th June, after a documentary screening at Hackney Picturehouse as part of the Open City Documentary Festival. Directly following the UK premiere of Desert Migration, Amanda with Doc Duhon will be discussing the film and long-term HIV/AIDS survival. The discussion will be framed through the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Matrixial Subjectivity created by the artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha L. Ettinger. They will address matters such as the lack of an HIV/AIDS memorial in London and the immediate need for the NHS to provide PrEP. Following the dialogue, there will be an audience Q&A as well as information on accessible activist actions to provide PrEP on the NHS now.

Further details here: http://opencitylondon.com/films/desert-migration

Anne Witchard is part of a panel discussing the 1962 film The London Nobody Knows at the Genesis Cinema organised by the Luxury Book Club.

The London Nobody Knows is an important film every Londoner should watch once. It’s a privilege to re-experience the city through the prism of Geoffrey Fletcher’s eccentric gaze. Fletcher loves the romance of ruins, relishing are the places where a fragile connection with the past remains intact. He’s an explorer and an adventurer, a Londonologist. The film sees James Mason (smart casual and dressed for adversity in a flat cap) taking a stroll through shabby 1960s London. Edwardian tearooms, unusual gas lamps and crumbling terraces, rococo funeral parlours and art nouveau pubs, the ‘sleazy snack bars’ and the cast-iron balconies, forlorn music halls, old Jewish tailors and outmoded East End boutiques; redundant curiosities on the brink of oblivion.

Further details here.

Wednesday 29 June 2016, 7pm, Carroll/Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8EQ
Tickets £5, available here

Nick Thurston, an artist and critic, will discuss the work of Information as Material, an independent publishing project, which he co-edits with Simon Morris and Craig Dworkin. Thurston will address questions of materiality of language and independent and experimental publishing, and explore ideas about appropriated and subverted technologies of communication.

The talk will be followed by a conversation between Nick and critic and academic, Stephen Voyce.

This is the fifth event in the Experimental Writing @ Carroll/Fletcher series. Organised by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster and Carroll/Fletcher, the series showcases contemporary developments in experimental writing and their relationship to the visual arts.

Nick Thurston has exhibited and performed internationally at Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Toulouse Museum of Contemporary Art, The Laurence Sterne Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, and Bury City Art Gallery, amongst others. He is the author of numerous publications ranging from poetry to prose essays. Since 2006, he has been a co-editor of Information as Material (iam). iam operates as a collective of writer-editors and as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve writing, publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, lectures and workshops. iam’s publications and editions are held in private and public collections around the world including Tate (UK), National Library of France (FR), and MoMA (USA). Nick’s own work is collected by the Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo and University of Pennsylvania), which archived his work in 2015. The collection includes his poems, short writings, interviews and book extracts (2006-2014). Nick is a Programme Director of interdisciplinary undergraduate Fine Arts programme at the University of Leeds and a Visiting Fellow in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen Voyce is Professor at the English Department at the University of Iowa, where he also holds appointments in the Digital Studio for the Public Arts & Humanities and the Center for the Book. He is the author of Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2013), the editor of a book of variations: love – zygal – art facts (Coach House Books, 2013), and the Director of the Fluxus Digital Collection. His work also appears in journals such as Jacket2 Magazine, Modernism/modernity, Criticism: A Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts, Postmodern Culture, and Open Letter. Voyce’s primary teaching and research interests include twentieth-century poetry, media studies, Marxist criticism and theory, and critical digital studies. Before joining the University of Iowa, he worked in the music industry and as a SSHRC-postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center in Toronto, Canada.

For more information, please contact either Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westminster.ac.uk
or Asya Bachelis: asya@carrollfletcher.com

Wednesday 22nd – Friday 24th 2016
Bishopsgate Institute, University of Westminster, London Metropolitan Archives

“Without Borders”: LGBTQ+ Archives, Libraries, Museums and Special Collections

The Queer London Research Forum at the University of Westminster is co-hosting the three-day 2016 LGBTQ+ Archives, Libraries, Museums and Special Collections conference in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute and the City of London through the London Metropolitan Archives.

ALMS is an international conference focussed on the work by public, private, academic, and grassroots organisations which are collecting, capture and preserving archives of LGBTQ+ experiences. The conference began in Minnesota in 2006 when the Tretter Collection and Quatrefoil Library co-hosted the first LGBT ALMS Conference. The last conference took place in Amsterdam in 2012 and saw archivists, activists, librarians, museums professionals and academics from around the world coming together to share success stories and discuss challenges involved in recording LGBTQ+ lives. The 2016 conference is titled ‘Without Borders’, and the aim is to generate a dialogue within the co-dependent fields of LGBTQ+ historical research and collecting, and share experiences, ideas and best practice through a programme of presentations and short talks that explore margins, borders, barriers and intersections, past and present.

An evening reception to welcome delegates to London and the conference will be held in the Boardroom of the University of Westminster’s building at 309 Regent Street from 6-9pm on Tuesday 21st June. To help with drinks catering, please register via this Eventbrite page: https://goo.gl/N8kkXe

The three days of the conference will then take place at the Bishopsgate Institute (June 22nd), University of Westminster, 309 Regent St (June 23rd), and the London Metropolitan Archives (June 24th).

Full details and conference programme at: http://lgbtqalms.co.uk/

Full three day ticket (includes Tuesday evening reception)

£220 Institution
£100 Self-funded / unaffiliated
£40 students / unwaged / concessions (proof required)

You can book online here.

Friday 17th June 2016
St Pancras Room, King’s Place, 09:30-17:00

Sexual Violence Against Women: Voice and Representation

This one-day symposium organised by the IMCC’s Dr Georgina Colby with Hannah Camplin aims to bring keynote academics and practitioners in the fields of law, politics, and charities into dialogue with writers, artists, and filmmakers who take up the issues surrounding sexual violence against women in their works.

The symposium will open with a keynote address by Professor Jacqueline Rose (FBA, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London), entitled ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence.’ Professor Rose’s keynote address will be followed by a lunchtime keynote paper by Keir Starmer MP, Holborn and St Pancras. There will be two afternoon panels on ‘Sexual Violence, Belief, and Credibility’, and ‘Voice and Representation: Empowering Voice and Enacting Change Through the Arts and Humanities’.

Tickets are priced at £6.00, excluding booking fee (£1.52). All proceeds from tickets sales will go to the Women’s Project at Asylum Aid. Tickets include coffee and refreshments throughout the day.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

Contact Georgina Colby for further information: g.colby@westminster.ac.uk.

Monday 20^th June, 10.30 am – 4.00 pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1

McLuhan’s Media Practice: Literature and Communication

Marshall McLuhan is a central and provocative figure in early media discourse – some of his pronouncements shaped the subject while others were divisive or obscure. However, his wide-ranging literary research, teaching and ground-breaking contributions to publishing still require detailed attention – for example, recent accessibility to his own richly annotated library presents a remarkable new research resource, while his collaborations with book designers remain hugely influential if inadequately understood. This symposium addresses McLuhan’s media practice from the dual perspectives of communication and literature, and introduces a new digital resource of archival McLuhan materials gathered from seven independent institutions and scholars during the last twelve months.

Discussing McLuhan’s contributions to our understandings of media practices, the history and futures of the book, and literary modernism, not least through his own annotations on texts by Joyce and others, the symposium welcomes participants from the Marshall McLuhan Estate, Canadian Embassy, Berlin and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, as well as academics, curators and publishers with a special interest in McLuhan.

Speakers include: Andrea Boegner (McLuhan Salon, Canadian Embassy, Berlin), Peter Cornwell (Data Futures, IMCC), David Cunningham (IMCC), Duncan Forbes (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland), Doris Gassert (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland), Jon Goodbun (Architecture, Westminter), Tom Lamberty (Merve Publishing, Berlin), Graham Larkin (art historian, Ottawa), Andrew McLuhan (McLuhan Estate), John Shoesmith (Director, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto), Leigh Wilson (IMCC), and Simon Worthington (Mute, Berlin)

Register for a place here.