Recent lectures, talks and readings

Professor John Burnside will be delivering the 2017 Berlin Poetry Lecture on 18th June as part of Berlin's International Poetry Festival. Entitled "Where executives would never want to tamper?" John contradicts W.H. Auden’s assertion that "Poetry makes nothing happen", to argue that it gives us a fuller understanding and is a political instrument that is desperately necessary today. The lecture will be published in a bilingual edition by Wallstein Verlag.

Professor Gill Plain will be speaking alongside novelist Sophie Hannah and gender theorist Professor Mary Evans at 'Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present' from 29th June to 1st July. The conference, organised by the Captivating Criminality Network, is hosted by Bath Spa University and – perhaps appropriately – will take place in a magnificent country house setting, Corsham Court in Wiltshire. Gill, though, will not be talking about bodies in libraries. Her paper, 'Crime and Rehabilitation? Masculinity, risk and generic reinvention in the 1950s' considers the impact of World War Two on crime narrative. In the aftermath of war, crime stories became a space for the reconstruction of male agency. Crime stories enabled a variety of different forms of man-making, a process the paper will track through the new postwar popularity of violent adventure thrillers, police procedurals and spy stories.

Professor Susan Sellers will be taking part in a round-table discussion at the 27th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference 'Virginia Woolf and the World of Books', from 29th June to 2nd July, hosted by the University of Reading. The title of the round-table is 'Woolf by the Book: Reflecting on Woolf Editions', and will give Susan an opportunity to talk about the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf's writing of which she is co-editor.

Susan will also be giving a reading from new work at an international conference entitled 'Reading Bloomsbury', to be held at Homerton College in Cambridge from 23rd to 28th July.