Supporting Caroline Harris (RHUL)

The AWW-STRUCK virtual day seminar on 21 May 2021 focused on Cute Studies in the Arts and Humanities, aiming to develop interdisciplinary and intercollegiate discussions and establish the collaborating institutions (Royal Holloway and the University of Birmingham) as a hub for this growing field. The seminar hosted three panels and a film screening, with papers from international professors, ECRs and PGR students based in the UK, Japan, Nigeria, Sweden, Canada and the USA, including four from Royal Holloway. 

The event was co-organised by Caroline Harris (RHUL) and Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham), with a linked online exhibition curated by RHUL graduate Astra Papachristodoulou. The day was introduced by Professor Redell Olsen (Poetics Research Centre, RHUL) and Dr Megan Cavell (Animal Studies Reading Group, University of Birmingham) and began with papers from Professor Joshua Paul Dale, co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and Professor Lesley Millar, who introduced her exhibition ‘Kawaii: Curating the Japanese Culture of Cute’. A recording of the second panel is available on the AWW-STRUCK website.

The online exhibition features work by 20 visual poets and includes pieces by three Royal Holloway PGRs. The exhibition is available to view on Poem Atlas, while these poetic pieces, alongside critical and creative texts by the seminar contributors, are collected in the AWW-STRUCK book.    

The event was enthusiastically received, with highly positive feedback on its breadth and importance for attendees’ research. One commented: ‘I loved hearing from both academics and poets/artists. The cross-conversation was very stimulating.’ Another said: ‘‘The atmosphere was really brilliant; participants were genuinely excited to be there, engage, and get into conversation, and the speakers were so passionate about each other’s work as well as their own…’ 

For more information see the AWW-STRUCT website:

https://awwstruckseminar.wordpress.com/

Organisers: Ruth Cruickshank (LLC), Judith Hawley (English), Andrew Jotischky (History), Stella Moss (History), Erica Rowan (Classics)

Wednesday 19^th and Thursday 20^th May 2021 on MS Teams

This HARI-funded online symposium explored constructs of the inedible, indigestible and unpalatable across historical periods and contemporary cultures, across the School of Humanities and across College. It explored the value judgements, power relations and cultural and economic imperatives that fuel perceptions of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable, raising questions of sustainability, integration, conflict and competition.

By addressing the objectives of the College’s Sustainable and Thriving Communities catalyst, the symposium acted both as a scoping exercise and as a showcase for current and prospective research, bringing together, celebrating and cross-fertilising intersecting research interests across the Royal Holloway community. The Keynote address was made by Professor Klaus Dodds (Geography), College Lead on the Sustainability and Thriving Communities catalyst.

supporting The Institute for Modern Languages Research in London

The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminar series brought together scholars working on the cultural representation of the violent past of the twentieth century across a variety of media and cultures. The seminars examined the contribution of cultural products to exposing the crimes of perpetrators and disseminating a sense of responsibility for the past in relation to events such as colonialism, wars, and dictatorships. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series explored the construction of the idea of responsibility for past wrongdoings across textual and visual media while addressing ethical questions stemming from the study of past atrocities. Bringing together scholars working across the disciplines, the event aimed to foster a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches in Modern Languages, History, and Memory Studies.

Programme of the series:

Session 1: 18 November 2020 3.00 pm

Max Silverman (University of Leeds): Impure Memory

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku): Non-Subsumptive Memory and Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen, ging, gegangen»

Donald Bloxham (University of Edinburgh): Beyond Neutrality: Historianship and Moral Judgement

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 2: 20 January 2021, 3.00 pm

Claire Gorrara (University of Cardiff): Family Legacies: Taking intergenerational responsibility for the crimes and losses of the Second World War in the graphic novel

Emiliano Perra (University of Winchester): End of Empire (Channel 4, 1985) and public memory of decolonisation in Britain

Stephanie Bird (UCL): ‘A tacit agreement’: Responsibility and perpetration in the work of Imre Kertész

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 3: 10 March 2021, 3.00 pm

Uilleam Blacker (UCL): ‘The colonisers decided everything’: Responsibility, victimhood and the Holocaust in Ukrainian memory culture

Federica Mazzara (University of Westminster): Mediating memory of migration: The role of art and activism

Damien Short (School of Advance Study UoL): Culture, genocide and (in)justice in Australia

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 4: 19 May 2021, 3.00 pm

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (University of Warwick): Developing a Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War: Public History and Memory

Diana Popa (Tallin University): Spectacular provocations: Spectatorship and Responsibility in Radu Jude’s Historical Films

Charles Burdett (IMLR) and Gianmarco Mancosu (University of Cagliari): Ghosts of Empire: Transnational legacies of Italy’s colonial past

Click here to watch the recording!

supporting The Centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway

The Centre for the GeoHumanities was delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham) to give the 5th Denis Cosgrove Lecture.

Geography and Vision are key words in the works of Denis Cosgrove, together the title of his Inaugural Lecture at Royal Holloway in 1996 and that of a career framing collection of essays published in 2008.  This lecture explored meetings of material and imaginative worlds in the works of painter and poet William Blake (1757-1827), and their implications for landscape as a field of vision. It addressed Blake’s representation of London and its environs in the early nineteenth century as it was transformed into a major imperial city, as well as images of cottages, cornfields and cathedrals.  Visionary Geography located Blake’s work in relation to wider currents of book and image making in his own time, including topography and cartography, and in terms of its long standing influence, for envisioning English landscape and its possible worlds.          

The lecture was supported by the RHUL Department of Geography, The Humanities and Arts Research Institute and the Leverhulme Trust. 

Supporting Agnieszka Studzinska & Edward Brookes in the Departments of English and Geography

In an exploration of urban politics and city spaces, ‘In the Absence of Visible Walls’ discussed urban regeneration through the lens of ‘the wall’. The wall is visceral and fundamental element of architecture, a 3D representation of the line. It demarcates, it is a boundary, it is architecture making a mark, a point of transition, a division. The wall creates space, it creates community, it is a device of control and power. We therefore position the wall as an architectural device that can be used to explore how we engage in notions of memory, loss, homes, demolition and boundaries. The project aimed to bring together the historical narratives of erasure, destruction and gentrification of ‘Robin Hood Gardens’, a housing estate in East London and the space of ‘Manufaktura’ and the boundaries of Litzmannstadt Ghetto in the city of Lodz in Poland (a ghetto that was created by the Germans during the Second World War in the Old Town and Baluty districts of Lodz) through the notion of ‘the wall’. It fused a dialogue between cultural geography and creative writing, text, film and image in an attempt to highlight the stories of sites, areas/spaces that have undergone and/or are currently undergoing change.

Supporting Victoria Mapplebeck in the Department of Media Arts

The Waiting Room is a VR Journey which tells the story of a breast cancer diagnosis (from the perspective of patient and film-maker) from treatment to recovery. 

In 2017, Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer. As part of her research project, she gained access to her tumour samples. Looking though the microscope at her own cancer cells inspired her to create a film and VR project which would challenge the language of illness and the cultural myths that surround this disease.

Using 360 video, real time audio and CGI, the audience experienced the emotions of a cancer diagnosis from the outside in. 360 sequences capture waiting rooms, operating theatres and chemo bays. The Waiting Room explored illness and mortality from a patient’s POV, putting under the microscope what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us.

Victoria Mapplebeck is a Professor in Digital Arts. Her research explores how multi-platform documentary has evolved since the late 1990s, from online interactive narratives to the immersive experiences offered by non fiction VR. Over recent years,  Victoria has begun to specialise in smartphone production and making short form online video with impact. 

Supporting Media Arts

18 June 2019, Senate House, London

Organiser: Prof Olga Goriunova

A Day with Rosi Braidotti brought together Royal Holloway researchers, both established and junior, who engage with Braidotti's work, followed by response by Braidotti herself. 

Rosi Braidotti emerged in the early 1980s as one of the strongest voices in feminism, philosophy, cultural politics, epistemology and ethics. Her book Nomadic Subjects established the project of nomadism that reformulated the notions of identity and subjectivity and engaged with transformative politics. Feminist nomadism critiqued the unitary subject, Euro-centrism, and acted to reactivate the dynamics between empowerment and entrapment through engaging with different levels of power and desire. The philosophical project of nomadism, further developed in Metamorphoses and Transpositions to engage with cultural politics and ethics connected to further work in eco-feminism and science and technology studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Her cartography of the human condition in the times of advanced capitalism evolved into her contribution to the development of the posthumanities, where The Posthuman continued to unfold the transversal and relational vision of the subject, while affirming an empirical project of transformative ethics based on such ontological relationality. Posthuman ethical subjects suggest a transformation for the human sciences - humanities today. Offering a political - and an institutional - programme, the new humanities emphasise the potential of the posthuman. Braidotti’s work has reactivated disciplines, arguing for a new form of knowledge and ethics and has had lasting influence on generations of researchers in numerous fields of study. 

Supporting The Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway

26th-27th April 2019

This project drew together colleagues across disciplines within the Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS) to examine how we research radicalism and reform in the long nineteenth century (1776-1914). Activities focused particularly on how digital technologies can help researchers excavate and analyse radical and reformist texts, networks and activities, presenting their findings to academic and non-academic audiences. Central to these activities has been a project to digitize the correspondence of Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a founder of Bedford College. Reid is a central but neglected figure in Victorian reform networks in Britain and transnationally. The College holds between 500 and 1000 letters, mostly to Reid from correspondents in Britain, Europe and the US that illuminate the complex connections within Victorian reform culture. 

Supporting the departments of Geography, and Drama, Theatre & Dance

Organisers: Dr David Overend and Professor Danielle Schreve.

Image by Anna May annamay.de

This project (2017/18) was a cross-disciplinary encounter with Britain’s ‘wild geographies’. Its focus was a creative exploration of time-dependent elements of habitat change in the context of rewilding initiatives. By engaging various publics in an enhanced scientific understanding of environmental change in urban and rural environments, a series of events prompted participants towards performative interventions in the British landscape. This collaboration brought artistic and scientific research together to reshape the imaginaries of conservation. It considered the efficacy of Performing Arts in enhancing public engagement with Quaternary Science, and applied specialist scientific knowledge to the development of site-based performance practice. The project’s proposal was that an enhanced understanding of Quaternary history (the last 2.6 million years), along with a creative sensibility to possible futures in wildlife conservation, can have a significant impact on the way that present publics engage with concepts of wildness and wilderness.

Supporting Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Organisers: Prof Giuliana Pieri, Prof Eric Robertson

For as long as art has existed, so too has the question of where and how it is experienced.

Art institutions, from the major national collections to regional museums, and university galleries, play an important role in reflecting, and in shaping, cultural identity. The practice and the reception of art are constantly evolving, and so the role of curating has diversified to engage with the changing nature and growing diversity of artistic practices.

This seminar series, which ran for four years (2014-2018), explored the relationship between curating, display, and space, and examined the ways in which different practices of curating can shape our understanding of physical as well as cultural environments. A range of invited speakers represented a wide cross-section of different types of art space with contrasting imperatives, objectives and priorities. The organisers’ aim and hope was that engaging in dialogue helps to generate debate on the myriad ways of shaping our encounters with art.

Supporting Media Arts

Organiser: Amanda Murphy

The 2014-2018 research project ADAPT TV History researched and documents the history of British Broadcast Television technology between 1960 and the near present. It’s primary research method was to reunite veteran TV crew with TV kit they once worked with and to film that reunion, and indeed the veteran crew ‘re-using’ the old kit in order to learn more about why and how TV was made the way it was in the past.

Led by ADAPT Digital Producer Amanda Murphy and co-funded by HARI and the Being Human Festival 2017, ADAPT presented a series of events offering participants the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in how television was made in the early days. ADAPT Live brought together some of the most extraordinary television pioneers and veteran TV crews, demonstrating the great skills that brought us the first colour TV shows and the first documentaries shot on film and on location in the 1960s/70s.

Participants had chance to get hands-on with some of the original kit and view unique footage filmed by the ADAPT team at Royal Holloway. Q&A sessions gave the opportunity to find out exactly what making early TV was like, and a Memory Booth was chance for participants to tell the team what television in the early days meant to them.

Supporting English

Alan Moore is a major UK contemporary writer: perhaps the world’s leading writer of graphic novels credited with revolutionising the medium; the ‘original writer’ for several major science fiction or historical (or, in one case, both) films, the author of a novel, Jerusalem (2016) and a major (counter-) cultural figure.

The aim of this academic conference was to attend to Moore’s writing as writing: to examine what core ideas influence him; what tropes reoccur and why; his influences and antecedents; questions of form, mode and genre; and about his wider role as writer.

Supporting English and Media Arts

In collaboration with Professor Juliet John in the Department of English, HARI Project Lead Adam Ganz coordinated a series of events at the British Library looking at screenwriters who have worked in other fields, with screenwriters or filmmakers talking about the work of their peers who are now in the British Library archives.

This built on a very successful event during the Screenwriting Research Network Conference at the Library where Oscar Winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood (whose work is in the Special Collections) was interviewed by Christine Geraghty about his career.

A series of talks explored the interrelationship between screenwriting, fiction, and playwriting as literary form and creative practice - and as one of the activities a professional writer of the twentieth and twenty-first century explored in their quest to earn a living. They focused on screenwriting as an important and neglected form of literary practice, created new links between scholars of Literature, Drama, Film and TV Studies and developed a holistic approach to texts and writers where the focus is fundamentally interdisciplinary. These events concentrated on the screenplay as a tool whose aim, as Professor Jonathan Powell has said is “to create as vivid a memory as possible of something which does not yet exist”.

Supporting English and Languages, Literatures & Cultures

This 2016-7 project was led by Dr Joseph Harris (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) and Dr Deana Rankin (English).

This project established a network of academics and practitioners from a wide range of practice-based, critical and theoretical backgrounds. Its participants explores the complex aesthetic, political, ethical and psychological questions raised by violence on the early modern stage. It revisited the received ideas that French drama ‘tells’ of violence while English ‘shows’ it; that the latter pushes the boundaries of the spectacular, while the former reinforces neoclassical decorum.

Both contextualising and challenging these assumptions, the project investigated the particular qualities of ‘liveness’, rehearsal and representation both in the early modern period and in contemporary stagings. It took as its primary focus a clear and familiar canon of work stretching from Marlowe through Shakespeare and Webster to Congreve and from Garnier through Hardy and Corneille to Racine.

The network combined close textual and historical analysis with workshops exploring theatre practice and technologies, old and new. Through an investigation at once philosophical and practical of theories of response (from catharsis to mirror neurons), it sought to re-examine the journey from page to stage, and from stage to audience.

Please see links to a selection of podcasts and videos from events supported by HARI. Video and audio archives of HARI events and conferences from 2008-2010 are available from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

• Exoticism in Contemporary Transnational Cinema: Music and Spectacle – A HARI conference held at Royal Holloway, Bedford Square, 16 June 2017

Selected speakers:

• Professor Rachel Dwyer: "My Name is Anthony Gonsalves: Imagining Goa and Goans as Exotic in Hindi Cinema"
• Dr Alan O'Leary: "Unnecessary Pasts: Earning the Pleasure in World Heritage Cinema"
• Professor Song Hwee Lim: "The Exotic in Contemporary Chinese Cinema"
• Professor Anna Morcom: "Exoticism and Appropriation: Representing and Assimilating Others and their Music in Hindi Film Songs"
• Professor Daniela Berghahn: "Seeing Themselves Through Western Eyes? Diasporic Filmmakers as Purveyors of the Exotic"
• Making Space for Art: For the Benefit and the Pleasure of the Community - A lecture by Jannet de Goede, Royal Holloway Egham campus,  22 February 2017.
• Making Space for Art: Home and Away: Exhibiting Australia's Impressionists in London - A lecture by Allison Goudie, Royal Holloway Egham campus, 1 February 2017.
• Exoticism as Keyword - Keynote talk by Prof. Charles Forsdick, HARC Symposium: Reassessing the Contemporary Exotic: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Contested Form of Cultural Representation. Royal Holloway Egham campus, 30 November 2016.
• Making Space for Art: Shoreditch Bridge Portraits - Dr John Perivolaris in conversation with Dr James Kent, Royal Holloway Egham campus, 19 October 2016.
• Making Space for Art: Creating Comic Invention - A lecture by Prof. Laurence Grove, Royal Holloway Egham campus, 18 June 2016.
• Making Space for Art Symposium – A symposium at Royal Holloway Egham campus, 19 June 2015.
• World Museums: Geographies and Genealogies - HARC Dialogue with Anthony Shelton (Director of the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia) and Annie E. Coombes (Professor of Material and Visual Culture & Director of the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London), Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, 19 May 2015. In collaboration with the London Group of Historical Geographers.
• Making a Space for Art: Curating a Static Collection: Kettle's Yard as a unique document of modernism - A talk by Dr Jennifer Powell, Kettle's Yard, 25 March 2015.
• Making a Space for Art: Coming Home: Reclaiming Hepworth for Wakefield - A talk by Frances Guy, The Hepworth Wakefield, 11 March 2015.
• Making a Space for Art: Curating the Historic House: Collections and Context - A talk by Tom Boggis, English Heritage, 12 November 2014.
• Making a Space for Art: Two case studies: Titian Metamorphosis 2012, National Gallery, London and Sampling the Myth, Royal Opera House, London, Minna Moore Ede, 15 October 2014.
• The Value of Eating - A HARC Dialogue between Annemarie Mol and Philip Crang. 13 March 2014.
• Food Value and Gender: Mediated Consumption, Anxiety and Potentiality  - HARC Dialogues: The Value of Eating, Roundtable with Ruth Cruickshank, Peter Jackson and Joanne Hollows,13 March 2014.
• Imperialism, Globalisation and Interdisciplinarity - A HARC Dialogue between Regenia Gagnier and Simon Schaffer, 5 February 2014.
• Disability and Culture – Whose Tragedy? Part of Royal Holloway’s Trauma, Fiction, History Series, 21 March 2013.
• Crisis, Creativity and the Self 1550-1700  - An interdisciplinary study day, 14 May 2013.
• Antonioni and the Arts - Antonioni's artistic legacy and the relations between cinema, art and the museum, 26 October 2012.
• Jacques Rancière "Modernity Revisited - Jacques Rancière in London, 9-10 March 2012.
• William E. Connolly "Time, Politics and Becoming" - A One-Day Conference on William E. Connolly’s A World of Becoming, 26 May 2011.
• The Philosophy of Literature: (T)exteriors From Marion’s version of phenomenology to Currie’s Arts and Minds, the philosophy that might underlie literature is being re-appraised. 16 March 2011.
• Francoise Balibar in Conversation - The Collège International de Philosophie  (CIPh) can be viewed as a by-product of the French May `68 revolt, 2 March 2011.
• Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past, Present, and Future The fear of Civilization collapse is a thread that runs through much of the literature, cinema, and other media of the nineteenth and twentieth century, 1 March 2011.
• Roundtable on "Theatre and Citizenship" - Event organized in conjunction with the publication of David Wiles 'Theatre and Citizenship: the history of a practice', 2 March 2011.
• The Philosophy of Literature - The Intentional Subject From Marion’s version of phenomenology to Currie’s Arts and Minds, the philosophy that might underlie literature is being re-appraised, 23 February 2011.
• Tony Harrison in Conversation and Performance - Leverhulme Artist in Residence, Department of Classics, 19 January 2011.