Here is the programme of conferences and seminars taking place at the Institute of English Studies during October.

Saturday 4 October 2008, London Nineteenth Century Research Seminar Series

University of London, UK
Senate House, Room NG15, 11:00-13:00

Speakers: Prof. Tim Cresswell (Royal Holloway), Prof. Josephine McDonagh (Kings College London), Dr David Lambert (Royal Holloway)

Roundtable: ‘Thinking Through Mobility in the Nineteenth Century’.

Here is the programme of conferences and seminars taking place at the Institute of English Studies during October.  For more information please visit www.sas.ac.uk/events/list/ies_whatson

Wednesday 1 October, Ezra Pound Cantos Reading Group, Room NG16 (Senate House), 18:00-20:00
Speaker: Helen Carr (Goldsmith’s) on Ur-Canto 2.

Friday 3 October, Irish Studies Research Seminar, Room NG14 (Senate House), 18:00-20:00
Speaker: Lucy Mcdiarmid (Montclair State University) on ‘Soccer, Masculinity and the Irish Family: Damien O’Donnell’s 35 A-Side’.

Saturday 4 October, London Nineteenth Century Research Seminar Series, Room NG15, 11:00-13:00
Speakers: Prof. Tim Cresswell (Royal Holloway), Prof. Josephine McDonagh (Kings College London), Dr David Lambert (Royal Holloway)
Roundtable: ‘Thinking Through Mobility in the Nineteenth Century’.

Saturday 4 October, Modernism Research Seminar, Room N336 (Senate House), 11:00-13:00
Speaker: Lucy McDiarmid, Montclair State University, on ‘The Peacock Dinner: Wilfrid Blunt, Yeats, Pound, and the Profession of Poetry’.

Saturday 4 October, EMPHASIS seminar (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination), Room 273 (Stewart House), 14:00-16:00
Speaker: Sven Dupré (University of Ghent) on ‘Material culture and the pursuit of natural knowledge in early-seventeenth century Antwerp’.

Monday 6 October, Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group, Room  274/275 (Stewart House), 18:00-20:00 Reading:
Gayle Rubin: ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Sexuality’ (1984) in “The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader” (1993);
Judith Butler: “Against Proper Objects” (Introduction);
“Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies”, 6.2 & 3 (Summer 1994);
Minnie Bruce Pratt: excerpts “S/H e” (1995).

Tuesday 7 October, History of Libraries Research Seminar, Room NG16 (Senate House), 17:30-19:30
Speaker: Dr John Screen (University College, London) on ‘From Helsinki to Irkutsk: Finnish military libraries from 1812 to 1918’.

Tuesday 7 October, Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar , Room NG15 (Senate House), 17:30-19:30
Speaker: Neil Sammells (Bath Spa University). Professor of English and Irish Literature, and Dean of Academic Development.  He is the author of “Tom Stoppard: the Artist as Critic” (1998), and “Wilde Style: the Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde” (2000), and co-editor – with Paul Hyland –of “Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion” (1992), “Writing and Censorship in Britain” (1992), among others.
Title: ‘Wilde in America’.

Wednesday 8 October, Literary and Critical Theory Seminar, Room NG15, 18:00 – 20:00
Speaker: Nathan Widder (Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway) on ‘Time and Discontinuity: Aristotle, Bergson, Deleuze’.
For details of optional preparatory reading, please contact Rowan Boyson.

Friday-Saturday, 10-11 October, Things Fall Apart, 1958-2008; conference/symposium.
The publication in 1958 of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, marked the beginning of a new era in African writing in English. It inspired writers and readers not only on the African continent but throughout the world. Fifty years later, this conference seeks to revisit that novel and assess its significance then and now. Speakers will include writers (among them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abdulrazak Gurnah), readers, artists, and critics from Africa, Europe, the UK, and the US. A dialogue between Chinua Achebe and the eminent Princeton scholar Simon Gikandi will conclude the conference.

Friday 10 October, The Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar, Room NG14 (Senate House), 18:00

Friday 10 October, John Coffin Memorial Literary Readings
University event at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre – SOAS, 18:00
Speakers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elleke Boehmer, Abdulrazak Gurnah
Chair: Professor Alastair Niven (Chairman of the Commonwealth Writers Prize Advisory Committee and President of English PEN)
African writers respond to the work of Chinua Achebe. Free and open to the public, but with limited space. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington,  Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0)207 664 4859

Tuesday 14 October, Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life Post-Graduate Forum, Room 274/275 (Stewart House), 17:45-19:45
The theme of this year’s postgraduate forum will be ‘On violence’. We will begin with Sigmund Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). Freud’s work is available in the Standard Edition or in the Penguin Freud, or via Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing at Birkbeck, QM and various other libraries. Benjamin’s essay is available in various collections including his ‘One-Way Street’.  It can also be found online here.

Tuesday 14 October, Wyndham Lewis Reading Group, Room NG14 (Senate House), 18:00-20:00
Speaker: Alan Munton on ‘The Art of Being Ruled’.

Wednesday 15 October, London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS), Room NG15 (Senate House), 17:00-19:00
Speaker: Richard Marsden (University of Nottingham) on ‘Hapaxes and Hard Words in the Heptateuch’.

Wednesday 15 October, London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, Room 273 (Stewart House), 17:30-19:30 Speaker: Paul Arthur (Curtin, Australia), “Future History: Digital Approaches to the Past”. Computer technology started to revolutionise the study of history more than three decades ago, and yet genres and formats for recording and presenting history using digital media are not yet well established. New modes of publication, new methods for doing research, and new channels of communication are making historical research richer, more relevant and more widely accessible. Many applications of computer based research and publication are natural extensions of the established techniques for researching and writing history. Others are consciously experimental. This paper explores the latest advances and how new media technologies have reconfigured the study of the past.

Wednesday 15 October, The Sloane Printed Books Project Launch at the British Library, 17:30-20:00
Speakers: Kristian Jensen (acting head of British Collections, BL), Professor Hal Cook (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, UCL), Arthur MacGregor (Ashmolean Museum), Giles Mandelbrote (Early Printed Collections, BL), Alison Walker (lead researcher, Sloane Printed Books Project). Programme at www.sas.ac.uk/events/list/ies_whatson.  Attendance is free but please register your name with Teresa Harrington, BL, 020 7412 7676; teresa.harrington@bl.ukThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , www.bl.uk

Thursday 16 October, The Senate House Library Friends Annual Charles Holden Lecture, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 18:00-20:00 Speaker: Dr Sarah Thomas (Bodley’s Librarian and Director of Oxford University Library Services) on “A New York Yankee in the Old Schools Quadrangle”. Dr Thomas reflects on her experience as a University Librarian at Cornell and Oxford. If you would like to attend please contact Marcella Mends, Library Office, Senate House Library, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; Tel: 020 7862 8432. Click here for other SHL Friends events.

Monday 20 October, English Literature Training Day for Research Postgraduates: Late 19th Century to the present day, British Library, 9.30-17:00
National Research Training Scheme study day.

Tuesday 21 October, Senate House Library Friends Museum of London in Docklands Tour, 14:30
Guided tour of the Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition at the Museum in Docklands.

Senate House Library, University of London has lent a first edition of “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886, which is featured in the Museum in Docklands exhibition. A guided tour of the exhibition, led by Julia Hoffbrand (Curator of Social & Working History at the Museum of London), has been arranged. Charges to be confirmed (in the region of £5), for a maximum of 15 participants. Participants should gather no later than 14.25 in the Museum entrance hall.  Travel and access information for the Museum of Docklands is available here. If you would like to attend please contact Marcella Mends, Library Office, Senate House Library, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; Tel: 020 7862 8432.

Wednesday 22 October, Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar, Room 273 (Stewart House), 17:30-19:30
Speaker: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London) on ‘“Our Time is Time of Fairly Tales”: Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales across the media and the Atlantic’. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen is a Teaching Fellow in Danish and Scandinavian Studies at University College London. His current research centres on Hans Christian Andersen’s periodical publications and on the Danish 19th-century illustrated magazine, Illustreret Tidende. Recent publications include articles in Scandinavian Studies and The Henry James Review, and a co-edited book about ‘border-crossing literature’ entitled World Literature – World Culture: Histories, Theories, Analyses (Aarhus UP, 2008).

Wednesday 22 October, Literary and Critical Theory Seminar, Room NG15, 18:00-20:00
Extracts from Catherine Malabou’s “What Should We Do with our Brain?”, trans. by Sebastian Rand (forthcoming). Please contact Rowan Boyson to obtain this text, or if you prefer, it’s available in French: “Que faire de notre cerveau?” (Paris: Bayard, 2004).

Thursday 23 October, Medieval Manuscripts Seminar, Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies (Senate House Library), 17:30-19:00
Speaker: Alixe Bovey (University of Kent) on ‘Misadventure in the Margins of the Smithfield Decretals (BL, Royal 10 E IV): Romance, Hagiography, and Leonine Abduction’.

Thursday 23 October, London Theatre Seminar, Room 274/275 (Stewart House), 18:30-20:30
Speaker: Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland)
‘Australian identity politics and the Theatre of Noëlle Janaczweska’.

Saturday 25 October, EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination), Room 273 (Stewart House), 14:00-16:00
Speaker: Ian Hunter (University of Queensland, Australia) on ‘Cosmos and Jurisdiction in Kant’s Cosmopolitanism’

Tuesday 28 October, English Literature Training Day for Research Postgraduates: Medieval to 18th Century, British Library, 9.30-17:00
National Research Training Scheme study day. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND REGISTRATION.

Tuesday 28 October, Inter-University Postcolonial Studies Seminar, Room NG15 (Senate House), 17:30-19:30 Speaker: Helen O’Connell (University of Durham). Title to be confirmed. Lecturer in the Department of English Studies. Her principal research interests lie in the fields of Irish literature and culture, English romanticism and critical theory. Her first book, “Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement”, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Friday 31 October, Finnegans Wake Research Seminar, Room NG14 (Senate House), 18:00-20:00