Andrew Benjamin: A Colloquium on Art’s Philosophical Work

Wednesday 4th November 2015, 5pm
Westminster Forum, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW.

Professor Andrew Benjamin (Kingston) will be with us at the Institute to discuss his new book Art’s Philosophical Work. The book offers an argument for how art ‘works’, using examples from Nicholas Poussin, Albrecht Dürer, Georg Baselitz, El Lissitsky and Karel Appel. Andrew’s talk will be followed by responses from Kaja Marczewska on ‘iteration’, David Cunningham on ‘relationality’ and Matthew Charles on ‘colour’.

The event is free and open to the public (guests will need to sign-in at reception).
Followed by drinks in The Green Man, Riding House Street.

Andrew Benjamin is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston University, UK, and Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Monash University, Australia. His many publications include Working with Walter Benjamin (2012), Of Jews and Animals (2010), Place, Commonality and Judgment (2010) and Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (2006).

Mnemoscape #3 out now

A quick plug for the third issue of Mnemoscape, edited by two of our former MA Art and Visual Culture students, Elisa Adami and Alessandra Ferrini, as well as the launch of their new website at: http://www.mnemoscape.org/

Devoted to the theme of ‘Set in Stone’, the new issue also contains a fine article by another of our ex-students, Mirna Pedalo, ‘Memory Rupture’.

Tottenham: The People’s Perspective seminar, Thurs 22 October

A note that the University of Westminster’s SSH Faculty Seminars for this year begin on Thursday 22^nd October, 5.00-6:30pm. These will be held every Thursday in room 2.11 in the University’s Little Titchfield Street building.

The first seminar will be led by Lea Sitkin and Dorrie Chetty from the Department of History, Sociology and Criminology, who will be giving a paper on “Tottenham: The People’s Perspective”, with a response by Nitasha Kaul from the Department of Politics and International Relation. Wine and soft drinks will be provided…

Future seminars include Elisabetta Brighi on New Architectures of Security, with a response from the IMCC’s David Cunningham (November 5th); Victoria Brooks from Westminster’s Law School on ‘Entanglements and Folds of Pleasure’ (November 12th), with a response by Adam Eldridge; Simon Avery and Kate Graham on Queer London (November 19th); Derek Hird on Chinese Men in London, with a response from our own Anne Witchard (December 10th); and, rounding things up, our old friends Ben Pitcher (Sociology) and Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopolous (December 17th).

Set the Controls … Nick Mason and Artists’ Contracts

October 27th 2015, 6pm
University of Westminster, Little Titchfield Street, London W1W 7BY

The Artist Contract in the Digital World

Chris Ancliff is the General Counsel (International) at the Warner Music Group and was previously General Counsel at EMI Group plc. Paul is the first full time CEO of the Featured Artists Coalition. Nick Mason is a renowned composer, musician and producer, who in some ways will be ‘coming home’ for the event – along with fellow architecture student Roger Waters, he held rehearsals for their band Sigma 6 in the student common room in what is now the Law School building. As part of Pink Floyd he later returned to play in the building’s grand art deco Portland Hall, where this event takes place. It is now almost 50 years since Pink Floyd signed their first contract with EMI, and the evolution of this relationship will be discussed, along with consideration of various current issues.

Attendance is free, please register online.

Generational Politics in Feminist History, Oct 14 2015

A final reminder that this year’s series of English Literature and Cultural Studies research seminars will kick off at 5pm on Wednesday 14th October with Victoria Browne from Oxford Brooks speaking on ‘Generational Politics in Feminist History’. Sanna Melin Schyllert, a doctoral researcher at Westminster, working on feminism and modernism, will respond to Victoria’s talk.

“Sisterhood” is the familial metaphor most often associated with feminism; yet in fact, metaphors of “feminist foremothers”, “mothers” and “daughters” are employed just as frequently to convey relationships between feminists of different ages and eras. This kind of generational symbolism has been subject to serious criticism in feminist theory in recent years – for giving rise to “Oedipal” anxieties, and portraying the history of feminist theory and activism in terms of a struggle between “overbearing mothers” and “undutiful daughters”. This talk will examine critiques of the generational model of feminism, thinking through various significations of the generational metaphor, and its relation not only to feminist history but historical time more generally.

This first seminar will be followed by a drinks reception to celebrate the start of the new series and to welcome the new members of our research community. The seminar will take place in Room 105, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW (nearest tube stations: Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street).

Directions here: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/directions/wells-street

Diaspora in the Field of Vision: HOMELandS seminar

A plug for an event organised by our colleagues in HOMELandS, the Hub for Migration, Exiles, Languages and Spaces, based at the University of Westminster.

Wednesday 28^th October 2015, 4-6 pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, Wells Street London W1T 3UW

“Diaspora in the Field of Vision”
Margherita Sprio, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media

Contemporary art practices that have emerged out of the existing art school structure in Britain have enabled a multitude of emerging practices to be given the current status that they hold in debates about visual culture. Diasporic artists since post war education expansion in Britain have become visible in small but significant numbers – in part supported by those sympathetic to the politics of educational equality. But also, supported by those for whom education and Diasporic experience were the life line that enabled both the art practices that now constitute contemporary art and also the critical debates that are now common place within contemporary art education. This paper will address some of the key issues that have been made apparent in the work of some contemporary Diasporic artists who live, work and have studied/study in London in relation to ideas of displacement migration, power and ethics.

Dr Margherita Sprio is a Senior Lecturer in Film History and Theory at University of Westminster and works on film practice and theory as well as the relationship of film theory to photography, contemporary art and philosophy. She is the author of Migrant Memories: Cinema and the Italian Post War Diaspora in Britain (Peter Lang, 2013).

The event is free and open to the public. Non-University of Westminster attendees please register with Cangbai Wang atc.wang6@westminster.ac.uk

Research Seminar Series 2015

This year’s series of English Literature and Cultural Studies research seminars will kick off at 5pm next Wednesday (14th October 2015) with Victoria Browne on ‘Generational Politics in Feminist History’. Sanna Melin Schyllert, a doctoral researcher in the department working on feminism and modernism, will respond to Victoria’s talk. This first seminar will be followed by a drinks reception to celebrate the start of the new series and to welcome the new members of our research community. The seminar will take place in Room 105, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW (nearest tube stations: Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street).

Please note that our next event will take place three weeks later, on 4th November: a colloquium on Andrew Benjamin’s new book, Art’s Philosophical Work, with contributions from Andrew Benjamin (Kingston/Monash), David Cunningham, Kaja Marczewska and Matthew Charles (Westminster).

All research seminars are free and open to the public (attendees who are not members of the University of Westminster will need to sign-in at reception). MA students, Doctoral and Postdoctoral researchers are especially encouraged to attend. Please contact either Lucy Bond or Matthew Charles for more details.

Form and Poetry: an exploration of Russian Formalism, Oct 23rd, Senate House

Following on nicely from the IMCC’s event on Marx-Form-Isms held at Westminster in June this year, our colleague Charles Denroche is speaking at an Institute for English Studies colloquium entitled Form and Poetry: An Exploration of Russian Formalism – ostranenie, city poetics, metaphor, metonymy – at Senate House on October 23^rd, 10.00-5.30. Further details here.

Transdisciplinary Problematics

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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

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

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 13^th 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.

PhD Studentship Opportunity: Penguin’s China: Reading China in Paperback

The Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster invites applications for a PhD studentship. The studentship consists of a fee waiver and annual stipend of £16,000 for three years. The Studentship will commence in January 2016, and is available to applicants with a Home fee status only (usually defined as applicants from the UK and EU). The research topic, to be supervised by Dr Anne Witchard and Dr Leigh Wilson, is ‘Penguin’s China: Reading China in Paperback’.

Penguin was the revolutionary paperback imprint of Allen Lane, and has played a broad and overtly political and cultural role in our society. An innovative British brand, Penguin’s publications offer a window on the development of thought and fashion through the twentieth century and, for the purposes of this doctoral project, on the varied ways in which British readers, adult and children, have thought about China.

The proposed PhD will investigate the role Penguin has had in shaping readers’ responses to China by assessing Penguin’s early back catalogue of books about China or on Chinese themes by both Western and Chinese authors during the 1930s and 1940s. The archive held at the University of Bristol holds an array of novels, poetry, reportage and non‐fiction for adults and children, from Pearl Buck’s classic The Good Earth (1960), to Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1938) as well as other works of forgotten writers such as Winifred Galbraith and children’s author, Tsui Chi. The diversity of titles encompasses the range of responses to and interactions with China during the early twentieth century. The PhD will not only explore the works held in the catalogue, but go beyond this to investigate the publishing decisions, the marketing strategies and the readers’ responses which were so significant in constructing the image of China in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s.

Full details on how to apply can be accessed here: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/380075/SSH-4-Penguins-China-Reading-China-in-Paperback.pdf

For further information, please contact Dr Anne Witchard: A.Witchard@westminster.ac.uk

The closing date for applications is 5pm on 30 September 2015.

A Marxist Heresy? Accelerationism and its Discontents

David Cunningham’s article in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy on the current debates around “accelerationism” is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy website here.

Shklovsky, Error and the End of Saint Petersburg, Thurs 4th June

Thursday June 4th
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1T

5:30 – 7.30 pm Keynote Lecture: John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton)
Shklovsky, Error and the End of Saint Petersburg

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books include The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, The Intangibilities of Form and The Necessity of Errors.

John’s lecture is the opening address of Marx, Form, Isms. For further details see: https://instituteformodern.co.uk/2015/marx-form-isms-june-4-5-2015

TRACES conference, June 8th 2015

Monday 8 June, 9.00 – 19.00
The Pavilion, University of Westminster, New Cavendish Street, London

TRACES
3rd Joint Researching the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities Conference

A Postgraduate conference, co-organised by Brunel University London and the University of Westminster

9:15 – 10:30  Ineffable Representations and Potentiality of Voice
Jaice Sara Titus, Sebastian Jenner, Jessica Worden

10:45 – 12:00  Unraveling Traces of Power and Conflict
Miriam Tedeschi, Simon Mcleod, Alejandra Perez

12:00 – 13:30  Vestiges and Reinterpretations of Marginalization
Lewis Church, Haein Song, Uyoyo Onemu, Gift Nyoni

13:30 – 14:30  Lunch

14:30 – 15:45  Retracing Accounts for Womanhood
Pernille Rubner-Peterson, Sarah Ann Milne, Suneel Mehmi

15:45 – 16:45  Tracing Aesthetics and Ethics
Marijana Nedeljkovic, Alice Tuppen

17:00 – 18:00  Keynote: Dr David Cunningham
“Traces of Capital, or, Are Some Things Unrepresentable?”

18:00 – 19:00  Prize Giving and Reception

Full programme here: Traces_Programme_1.