Professor Robert Crawford will be giving a lecture at Corpus Christi College, Oxford on 6 February to accompany an exhibition at the college of Body Bags/Simonides – a collaborative project between Professor Crawford and the Edinburgh photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath. Body Bags/Simonides juxtaposes new Scots versions of Simonides’ work alongside black-and-white photographs by McBeath. Body Bags/Simonides has previosuly been shown at Edinburgh College of Art as part of the 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival, and was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary in November 2011 (it will also be shown in StAndrews in March, as part of the StAnza poetry festival). An accompanying book, Simonides, has been published by Easel Press. Professor Crawford’s lecture will take place in the college auditorium, which where the exhibition will hang throughout the month of February. Full details can be found at the University of St Andrews events pages.

This year, the theme is the fantastic, exploring such tropes and motifs as the gothic, the grotesque, the inclusion of fairy tale, the representation of the conscious and unconscious mind, ghosts and mirroring. The other judges are Professor Gina Wisker and Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Full details of the competition can be found on the Katherine Mansfield Society web site.

The Byre Theatre, with whom the School of English has close connections, led the bid, along with other local partners including StAnza: Scotland's International Poetry Festival (with whom the School also has close connections).

Ben Davies has been invited to speak at a Critical Sexology Seminar at Queen Mary, University of London on 30 March. The seminar is entitled ‘Sexuality and Time’, and his talk will be on ‘The Erotics of Exceptionality: Agamben, Time and Sex’. As their web site explains: ‘Critical Sexology is a London-based, interdisciplinary seminar series for psychologists, psychoanalysts, medical doctors, literary and cultural studies scholars, philosophers, artists, lawyers and historians with a critical interest in the construction and management of gender and sexuality in the medical, discursive and cultural spheres’.

Verita Sriratana’s article ‘“Carrying consciousness like a feather on the top, marking the direction, not controlling it”: Virginia Woolf and Buddhist Consciousness’ has been published as part of a volume entitled Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2011. Further details can be found here.