School of English news - May 2013
Zinnie Harris's A Doll's House at the Royal Lyceum Theatre
Zinnie Harris’s version of Henrick Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which was first staged at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2009 (with Gillian Anderson and Christopher Ecclestone among the members of cast) has had its Scottish premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where it is being staged from 16 April till 4 May in an all-Scottish co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. Her version of the play transposes the setting from late 19th-century Norway to Edwardian London and shifts the tale of intrigue, fraud and betrayal from the world of finance to that of politics. Details of the production can be found at http://www.lyceum.org.uk/whats-on/production/a-dolls-house.
Talks, Readings, Lectures, Previews and Radio Broadcasts
A busy month of events featuring Prof Don Paterson, Prof Susan Sellers, Jacob Polley, Prof John Burnside, Prof Nick Roe, Dr Louise Wilson and Dr Sarah Dillon.
As part of his Visiting Professorship at St Anne’s College, Oxford during Trinity Term (22 April till 15 June), Professor Don Paterson will be delivering The Weidenfeld Chair in Comparative European Literature lectures on the topic of ‘The Domain of the Poem: Lyric, Sign, Meaning and Rhythm in Contemporary Ars Poetica’. There will be four lectures in total, and these will take place on 30 April, 2 May, 7 May and 9 May. Details here. Don also gave a talk and reading at a Poetry Evening at Aberystwyth Arts Centre (in association with Contempo: the University of Aberystwyth Centre for Contemporary Poetry) on 25 April. On 13 May, he will be appearing at The Rialto and Writers’ Centre Norwich, in an event with Sophie Hannah and Hannah Lowe. On 15 May, he will take part in a Rilke Discussion and Reading at Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford, and 17 May, also in Oxford, he will be participating in a ‘Poets for PEN’ event staged by the Oxford Branch of PEN and the Oxford Poetry Society. From 24–26 May, Don will be at How the Light Gets In: the Hay-on-Way Festival of Ideas 2013, where he will take part in a discussion on ‘Error, Lies, and Adventure’ on the 24th, another on ‘Poetry and the Transmission of Errors’ on the 25th, and one on ‘To the Ends of the Universe’ on the 26th. Full details of the festival can be found here.
On 1 May, Professor Susan Sellers will be interviewed by Leigh Chambers and Alex Ruczaj for Book Night on Cambridge 105 community radio. On 10 May, Susan will be discussing her novel Vanessa and Virginia as part of the Michaelhouse Festival in Cambridge.
On 4 May, Jacob Polley will be reading with Paul Farley and Lavinia Greenlaw at a ‘Best of British Contemporary Poetry’ event at the Sheffield Lyric Festival. Ballads of Blood, Jacob’s interdisciplinary musical collaboration with composer Luke Goss and the London Sinfonietta, will one of three new works previewed at a Blue Touch Paper event in London on 14 May.
On 9 May, Professor John Burnside will be taking part in an event with Rita Ann Higgins at the Writing on the Wall Festival in Liverpool. On 27 May, John will be reading with Sean Borodale at the Southbank Centre in London, as part of the Bees and Nature series and the London Literature Festival. Details here.
Professor Nick Roe will be giving the ‘Director’s Lecture’ on John Keats at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, on Saturday 18 May, and on Sunday 19 May he will be speaking on John Keats to the Living Literature Society at Keats House in Hampstead.
Dr Louise Wilson will be giving a paper, ‘Theories of pleasure in early modern literary criticism’, at the University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies’ symposium, ‘Poetics and Prose Theory’, on 29 May.
On May 30, Dr Sarah Dillon will be talking with Dr Christine Knight about their research project 'What Scientists Read' at Looking Glass Books in Edinburgh.
Publications
Dr Lorna Burns with Wendy Knepper (Brunel University) have co-edited the latest special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, which focusses on the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris.
The issue will be published at the end of April and will also feature Dr Burns’s article, ‘Philosophy of the Imagination: Time, Immanence and the Events that Wound Us in Wilson Harris’s Jonestown’.
Partitions Network
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri has helped set up Partitions: What are they good for? – an international research network funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and managed jointly by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University and the School of English, University of St Andrews.
This network seeks to promote cutting-edge, interdisciplinary and comparative research on political partitions across a wide historical and geographical span. Three symposia in Cardiff and St Andrews will be staged in 2013–14 in order to set up high quality comparative and interdisciplinary research on politically partitioned countries and to promote excellent single discipline as well as cross disciplinary scholarship in literature, history, sociology, law, and politics on the topic of national partitions. You can find out more about the symposia, and other activities, on their website: http://www.partitions-net.com.
Undergraduate News
Lincoln’s Inn has awarded Charlotte Baker the Lord Denning Scholarship for £15,000 in order to complete her BPTC barrister training.
Postgraduate News
Congratulations to Katherine Cooper Wyma and news from Claudia Daventry and Jessica Volz.
Congratulations to Katherine Cooper Wyma, who has been awarded her PhD. Her thesis was entitled: ‘The Penitential Psalms in Sixteenth-Cenutry England: Bodies and Texts’.
Claudia Daventry will be giving a reading with poets Matt Harvey and Murray Lachlan Young at the Word Cafe in London on 2 May. She has also won the prize for the Poem about Dance in the Flamingo Feather competition, judged by Mimi Khalvati, and has thus been invited to read at Keats House on 25 May.
Earlier in April, Jessica Volz served as a Communications Advisor (unpaid) for the OECD Global Forum on Development (Paris): http://www.oecd.org/site/oecdgfd/